The biggest moat is going to be which companies understand something that's super hard for other people to understand.

And if your answer to that is, I don't know, then you maybe could get vibe coded away.

Block was one of the first to make a pretty drastic decision in cutting 40% of the workforce.

What led up to that decision?

There's been this correlation between the number of folks at a company and the output

from the company for decades and decades.

I think that basically broke.

And what we're seeing is that one or two engineers who is on the tools is able to be

10, 20, 100x more productive.

Over time, it's like pretty obvious that these systems are just going to be so much better than having a thousand humans who are doing that work.

I do believe that fundamentally for a given product or for a given roadmap, you're going to need fewer engineers, fewer designers, fewer PMs.

I think that's like very, very clear.

So you show up on Monday 40% of the company's gone. What's the most meaningful difference in how you're operating?

I think the biggest thing is...

For most of the history of software, building faster meant hiring more people.

The relationship was so consistent it became a law of the industry.

Headcount equals output.

Block, the parent company of Square,

Cash App and Afterpay, decided to test what happens when that equation breaks. In early 2006, they restructured more than 40% of the company and rebuilt around small squads of one

to six people, working alongside AI agents.

Teams that once had 14 engineers now run with three.

Their internal tool, BuilderBot, autonomously ships features to production.

...