"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
"We are our own most demanding customer. Cloudflare’s usage of AI has increased by more than 600% in the last three months alone. Employees across the company from engineering to HR to finance to marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions each day to get their work done. That means we have to be intentional in how we architect our company for the agentic AI era in order to supercharge the value we deliver to our customers and to honor our mission to help build a better Internet for everyone, everywhere."
As an English enthusiast, I'm getting very frustrated at how the language is consistently abused in executive communications to write words without saying anything.
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
"We’re basically using our own staff as guinea pigs. Our AI usage has spiked 600% lately, mostly because everyone from HR to marketing is leaning on bots to do their actual jobs. We’re forced to restructure the whole company around these agents just to keep up with the hype, hoping it actually helps us ship something useful and justifies the "better internet" PR we keep pushing."
I don't read this as employing 20% was twiddling their thumbs and sitting around.
If it means anything beyond economic issues, I read the implication as their LLM expenses have gone threw the roof and with the choice of cutting LLM use or cutting headcount, well we see what mattered more to them.
Unfortunately I think we’ll see more and more of this as companies continue to encourage their employees to use LLMs everywhere and for everything. Eventually they will have to come to terms with the cost of such mandates, and it’s either ask your employees to “use AI less,” or it’s let some percentage go and continue to let the rest burn tokens.
I am perplexed at how it can cost so much. I have been using AI every day, all day for a few months now and I have not even gotten to spending $300 a month. I use Cursor for teams, so we get ~$80 of usage for our ~$40 per member, then we pay Cursor's upcharged API rates from there, and I STILL don't spend more than $300 a month, if that. What the hell is everyone doing with their fucking tokens?
No, it is more accurate to say that leadership at Cloudflare does not know what they are doing nor have they known what to do for a good decade now.
Acting like workers at Cloudflare have any meaningful say in how work is made or the direction of the company is delusional neoliberal fantasy thinking.
The onus of poor business outcomes is laid directly on its leadership. Saying that workers were unproductive when they were coerced to follow leadership's mandates is just straight up class warfare.
So you would contend it's in the economic sense. It wasn't intended as an assignment of blame, I was just saying Cloudflare either thinks they weren't doing the job or job they were doing wasn't making money.
it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.
I believe they meant that the cost of using an LLM is extremely high! There are reports of people spending USD $500~1000 a day! There's the possibility of decoupling of effort and output! Which causes an illusion of work.
No, and nobody is going to find it when the guy from a third world village using a fake name that they hired to vibecode features puts a bitcoin miner in one of his daily 10k line agentic PRs.
Of course it's a lie. Cloudflare is saying, essentially: "AI is making us so profitable that we've decided to reduce our profit by 20%, to keep it reasonable."
But they’re not profitable? They make 450k per employee revenue, but lose 17k profit. Meanwhile they spend 470 million in stock based compensation for example, up 100 mil from year before, on 5k employees, which they’ve been increasing a lot every year.
Look at the chart of their stock price over the past couple of months. There was a huge run that started literally just over a week ago. Even after this 20% drop, the price today is only slightly below where it was before that run.
Their stock price has been pretty volatile for a while now (6+ months), so even with a swing of this magnitude I don't think it's valid to see it as much more than a correction.
I am confused by this post. No trolling: You wrote "reduce". Did you mean to say/write "increase"? If you layoff people to reduce costs, then your profitability should increase.
You also have to consider nowadays whether a human even wrote most of it, or if is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
But yes I agree the trigger for layoffs is never massive productivity, the reasons give here are completely bogus and if management actually believe any of it the company deserves to die.
Firing people because they became more productive with AI does not really make sense. If productivity went up, the company should be able to ship more, support more customers, or grow faster with the same team. This sounds less like an AI efficiency story and more like a funding or cost-control story dressed up to keep investors calm
I will reply here assuming that you posted with good intent. I think that their PR statement is reasonable from an investor perspective. Try to detach yourself from the personal effects of layoffs. In short, they are saying: Thanks to AI, we don't need as many people to run our business. It is pretty clear to me. Sure, you can be angry about the layoffs, but the economics are clear: AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing, so they are using layoffs to reduce costs. Imagine that you have an HR team of five people. If AI has dramatically improved worker efficiency, can you have an equally effective HR team with only four people? That is basically what happened here.
> They fired some talented folks. Folks who could be retrained.
I see this sentiment a lot on HN. To be clear, I am responding from the perspective of US labor law and general business practices. Employment is not a sacred right in the US. The US system is (larely) hire and fire easily. As a result, the US economy is mildly unstable for the middle class normies (much, much less stable that most other highly developed nations with strong labor laws -- most of G7/G20), but overall wildly dynamic for a large economy.
"They fired some talented folks."
Sure. That is guaranteed with large layoffs. I work in an insanely competitive industry, and there are annual culls each autumn of the bottom 5%. Few are surprised by who gets cut. What is harder to forsee is a business downturn and they need to layoff X% of staff. You see good people let go. That's just life in that kind of system.
"Folks who could be retrained."
Again, in the US, for white-collar office workers, this almost never happens, and surely not for very highly skilled software developers (probably most of the layoffs at Cloudflare). It is not required by law, and it is not a common business practice in the US.
Unfortunately, "holistic" investors able (and willing) to look at the bigger picture and recognize that things like "institutional knowledge" cannot be expressed on a balance sheet are not the norm.
The norm - outside of outliers like Warren Buffett - is "when numbers go up then buy when numbers go down then sell".
The financialization / stonkmarketization of everything is slowly destroying our economies like a cancer.
I would say the GP's phrase: "more productivity means fewer people are required" is perfect summary of my opinion (and post). Sure, you can flesh if out, but that is crux of my argument.
I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.
> For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently
I don't know what to think when I see comments like this. Everyone makes mistakes. And no one provides flawless service. If their recent issues are so damaging in your opinion, why is their business continuing to expand at more than 20% per year?
I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?
> AI is increasing profitability faster than the business is growing
I don't understand how this could be the case for Cloudflare specifically. They made their name with DDoS protection and sandboxed hosting. These are exactly the products whose demand rises in lockstep with agent adoption. How could they possibly be allowing all the growth opportunity to slip past them? In times like this, with rising productivity to boot, you increase headcount, not decrease.
I hope this bubble bursts soon. HR people avoiding to do their actual job seems like it is the modus operandi in the majority of businesses these days.
Which part of that sentence was confusing? I found it perfectly clear. Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.
Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
The sentence is not confusing, the sentence doesn't mean anything. There's nothing confusing about it, but there's no information either. "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.
Enlighten me then as to the secret meaning behind the words used to communicate in the language we call English. Saying that AI is really transforming the company is fine. Saying that 20% of staff need to be laid off is fine. Those are understood terms. How do they relate? There's no explanation. Did cost need to be reduced? Did those people no longer add value? Was there certain projects that weren't profitable? Nothing is explained because meaning is avoided.
> "We're making great strides in AI" and "We need to cut 20% of people" are simply two statements without any connection aside from the fact that they are next to each other in the sentence.
Huh? How is it not connected? More productivity means fewer people are required. I'm not sure how you are not able to connect these obviously connected statements.
There’s an optimal number of employees required at any productivity point.
Why don’t Google hire 3 times the number of developers? They have the money right? What’s your logic for not hiring more?
Hiring and firing people aren't symmetric actions.
They're asymmetric because hiring more people costs more than just the salary. For example, some folks' entire jobs are to recruit and hire people. Once they are hired, you have to onboard them, etc. So the more you hire, the more you have to pay the folks with supporting roles (either directly or by way of them not having infinite time/capacity).
Firing people isn't free, either. It comes at the cost of bad PR and severance, but the latter is voluntary and calculated by the company, and the former is quickly forgotten by anybody that matters to a publicly traded company (investors).
That means not hiring those two people in the first place is usually cheaper than firing them later.
To the original point: Cloudflare isn't hiring fewer people; they are firing people. If they are trying to grow (like every single investor is counting on them to do), then why would they fire people (the cheaper action) now when they would likely need to hire people (the more-expensive action) later in order to meet that increased growth?
The charitable answer would be that the people they are firing were deemed unable to adapt to using AI for all of this supposed increased productivity. But Cloudflare aren't saying that. In fact, they're saying the opposite by stating it's not about individual performance.
your's is a caveat against my larger more correct point: there's an optimal number of employees needed at any given productivity point.
its true that hiring and firing are asymmetrical, and CF has shown that they are willing to bear the brunt of the asymmetry and fire people despite the downsides.
that asymmetry lies doesn't disprove the original point: cloudflare simply doesn't require the _same_ number of people to work for them with AI.
if you disagree with this then you believe that companies should only have monotonically increasing number of employees which is quite ridiculous a claim
> Their internal AI use is exploding, which is a signal that they need to structure for that, and so they’re laying people off as one of the first steps towards actioning that signal.
I don't see anywhere where the jump from "structuring for AI" directly leads to "laying people off", unless "structuring for AI" means there is less work for people to do, do you?
Noone knows what the correct structure for this new world looks like. We’ll see what they end up hiring for. But it’s fairly standard to lay off a bunch of people and hire new, rather than retrain, when you need to restructure
Not really. This is all so new, noone is using it correctly, because noone knows how to yet. We’re all just kind of flailing our arms around with it, but it’s clearly a force multiplier and its increased use is an actionable signal
Why does this entire article read like chatgpt? Kind of ironic considering the content.
Big llm smells:
'Not "AI helps you autocomplete a function." Not "AI explains a stack trace." I mean the full-on narrative:'
'Sure, it's a weird language. It looks archaic. Sometimes it's hostile. Sometimes it's beautiful.
But still—if you know what you're doing—you can sit down with a keyboard and turn words into:
a product
a workflow
an automated business process
a system that makes money while you sleep
a tool that saves a team thousands of hours
That's real power. It's leverage.'
'Not because we're lazy. Not because we're gatekeeping. Because building real systems is hard, and the number of people who can reliably do it is limited.'
Sometimes I think we get too caught up on what chatgpt will do to the economy, software, and businesses, and forget the most insidious aspect of this type of technology - we will no longer know how to write and all human text communication will confirm to a specific pattern.
I don't know if it's LLM-generated or not, but I'm guessing you're right. It sure as hell matches the horrible choppy LinkedIn blogspam pattern, though, and that was enough to bounce me right there.
The next generation on humans growing up with TikTok autogenerated AI videos written by ChatGPT, generated by Sora and uploaded to the web using OpenClaw or whatever automation tool you wrote using Claude Code.
There are literally people running bots creating such shortform videos as we speak.
And there are millions of kids (and adults) scrolling those same videos as you reading this.
There's money to be made if you can build an audience. There are many ifs on the way of course, but some people do earn handsomely from publishing. They're called content creators or influencers.
Nobody was suggesting solutions, but in regards to GLP-1 agonists as solving the 'problem' perfectly, no, it's just solving the symptoms. The problem is scientific advancement creating hyper palatable food and drink with no nutritional value and low satiety, combined with the food drive increases that comes with eating and drinking that food, combined with the removal of general fitness and mobility as a core requirement to being able to receive food and drink. I'm not saying there's a way to put back in the box but let's not kid ourselves that these drugs are a perfect solution either.
I think GLP-1s are a great hack until gene therapy can be used to fix the underlying genetic issue that leads to the brain chemistry expression requiring the temporary GLP-1 patch.
It can be manufactured inexpensively, scales up, and will be as common as insulin or Metformin.
I'm no big lover of short form video content, but Cal Newport comes across as a bit obtuse in this article. Why is he surprised about these videos being used for consumptive purposes? I find the short, attention grabbing videos ala reels, tiktok, shorts, or vine not much different than modern tv. Have you tried watching TV from your peripheral vision? It's nothing but rapid, jarring cuts and bursts of color.
A few weeks ago, I read a 1300 page fantasy book. A few weeks before that, I read a 400 page nonfiction book on a subject I'm interested in. I've also read philosophy, wrote in a journal, watched tv shows and movies, browsed TikTok for hours, and took many walks around the park. I really can't say I find any of these experiences any more meaningful than the others. Anti-consumptive behavior has its place when a life is out of balance, but we're all going to die, so does it really matter in the end?
TV is very different despite being made to look like short bursts of colors and cuts because unlike short form content, there is a theme or a story that is being played through, our brain is engaged on a much longer arc of a story than short video content which does not give the viewer enough time to think beyond what is shown.
I agree that the medium through which one has pleasurable experiences is very subjective, but at the same time how much of it is consumed, absorbed and captured is what I think matters when talking about a medium being just for consumption purposes. Earlier web and social media was a lot about contributing and having a dialogue now its vastly about consumption or some form of outlet which does not encourage any traditional engagement but a passive viewing.
That being said, all these channels also have content which is good and enriching. But to reach that one has to be familiar with the platform to navigate away from the algorithm and also be looking for it. The idea that TikTok throws in only the entertaining content for selected topics at the get go says a lot of the culture its promoting and encouraging.
From reading about this and Ozempic it appears the main functionality is reducing appetite / blood sugar spikes which results in weight loss. I am curious for those who are using it who have traditionally had a relatively poor diet (refined carbs, sugars, etc), has it changed what foods are desirable or does it simply reduce the amount eaten? In addition, when using these products and switching to a healthy diet such as high protein, which already typically affects satiety, does it cause the inability to eat an adequate amount of calories to function properly?
I was diagnosed with Diabetes 2 years ago.
As soon as I found out I immediately changed my diet.
0 carbs
My blood sugar would still go too high.
My fasting blood sugar (first reading in the morning after waking up. "12+hr fasting") was often the highest of the day.
I spent the next 14 months trying different drugs to mitigate my blood sugar levels.
So one day out of desperation I asked my Doctor if i could try ozempic.
It worked INCREDIBLY well.
I started adding carbs back into my diet.
My blood sugar stayed in good shape.
I started loosing weight too.
Before Ozempic and going 0-carbs I lost ~20lbs over 14 months.
After taking Ozempic I have lost ~80lbs.
I still STRONGLY desire sugar/sugary foods.
My cravings for bread is really bad too.
Ozempic controlled my sugar so well that I have been able to add carbs back into my life.
Is it even possible to have high blood sugar while eating zero carbs? You could be catabolising muscle mass but that would be a case of extreme malnutrition and/or type 1 diabetes.
These drugs fix symptoms only, and only for ad long as you keep using them. They have adverse effects, and probably well beyond the published ones. Most signs point to T2D being caused by insulin resistance, which builds up through bad diet and lifestyle. You can 'fix' symptoms by forcing the body to pump out more insulin, but science and common sense would indicate that this could end up worse off in the long run.
Did you measure 1 hour after wake up? At wakeup there's the "dawn effect" where glucose rises/ketones fall.
What diet did you really try? Keto diet is known to ~easily fix T2D. A good company that can do that is virtahealth.com.
The only way to quit drugs (sugar) is to no take drugs at all, not take less drugs.
Source: I do keto diet but for other reasons. I was addicted to carbs, but not fat, and am no more. I would end up as T2D in 10-20 years though. If I restart carbs I will get addicted again.
It's probably the protein. Not eating fat should also feel horrible too, messing hormones etc.
Source: Pretty well known in keto epilepsy/cancer/psychiatry. I do epilepsy keto diet. Having high protein will increase glucose & lower ketones (tested blood many times with just 2 ingridients beef & beef fat). I aim for 80%-90% of calories from fat. Or 2 to 1 weight ratio of fat and protein/carbs.
For T2D you probably need just 60% fat calories though.
Why is your preferred set of professionals better than another? Do you have research showing that treating obesity as a substance abuse disorder has positive outcomes?
My dad was like you. At age 61 I finally got him to try 90 days of only fresh home squeezed/extracted vegetable juice. Technically all his calories those 3 months came from the sugars in the vegetables (celery, beets, carrots, cucumbers, tomato, orange).
All his markers improved, even diabetic markers, and blood pressure. He's off the 3 meds he was on.
Definitely. I'm not saying that 10 lbs of vegetables a day is healthy or anything. That would be crazy. You gotta add processed hormone injected meats, boiled dairy, and preservatives to get a healthy balanced diet.
Population that spends more every decade and gets less healthy, vs senior citizen that gets off all his meds by changing his eating habits by trying juice for 90 days.
No, although anecdotally some people find they can't eat high-fat foods any more. It has changed my reaction to hyperpalatable foods though, in that I don't really get the buzzing "just smoked a cigarette" effect from them any more.
> when using these products and switching to a healthy diet such as high protein, which already typically affects satiety, does it cause the inability to eat an adequate amount of calories to function properly
Not if you don't ramp your dosage up too quickly, but if you were to overdo it, then I guess it would.
I am curious too. I'm not "obese" by the medical defs (84kg, 177cm, 50s) but I could eat forever and constantly and I find that every time I finish some small amount of work (need to switch to the next issue) I get up and walk to the refrigerator looking for a snack. I generally keep from overeating by just not having any junk food nearby (though that's harder at work) and almost no calorie laden drinks. I don't feel hungry, I just seem to love eating. So I wonder if Ozempic would have any affect if all it does is remove my appetite since it "feels" like I don't have one most of the time.
Yes, the psychology of eating is generally under explored topic.
Some of the most obese people I knew had serious psychological wounds that they never healed.
Personally I end up feeling the opposite - I can eat the same weekday lunch for days in a row, and often get a sense of boredom of food before fullness.
I enjoy food, but I also enjoy lots of other things.. and not every bite/meal needs to be a work of culinary art. Italians would probably find this sacrilege.
For me there's a sense of food fitting a function during the week - nutrient/calories, versus going out to dinner on weekend for the social/enjoyment aspects.
I'm 35, same weight and similar symptoms.
I'm just always hungry.
I found some sort of balance where I go 5 times/week to the gym, increased muscles and eat very healthy (fruit, legumes, chicken, veggies). It still didn't solve the problem of being always hungry.
I could say it's psychological, but my son, 3, is the same: he is constantly looking for food. My daughter (6) is like my wife and she sometimes barely eats.
I'd love to lose weight though. I have been going to the gym a lot for the whole year, but my weight dropped only temporarily.
From what I understand about Ozempic and friends is that it's not meant for super long-term use (I can't remember the exact time, like months to a year at most). Do you feel like that's reasonable? As in, do you feel like this is letting you form better habits that will continue after you stop using it? Or do you even have a feel for that (probably hard to guess how you will feel when you are off it)?
There have been long-term studies of semaglutide much longer than a year. I'm not aware of any finding that indicates that long-term use should be avoided. There is some indication that the weight loss plateaus within the first several years for most people, but the weight control and blood sugar control effects are persistent.
does it cause the inability to eat an adequate amount of calories to function properly
IANAD, but anecdotally it has been seen that a substantial - and arguably worrisome - amount of the weight loss is in lean body mass[0], so probably. GLP-1 agonists are for many obese and at-risk diabetics a worthwhile trade-off. Losing that last pesky 10 lbs. because you don't want to give up your daily 500 calorie latte? Probably not.
If you dont resistance train, any weight loss regimen will cause a loss of lean body mass, medications aren't different from an "organically" achieved caloric deficit. Training and size of the deficit as well as genetics heavily shift the proportion of adipose to lean tissue (which includes water) lost.
So far as i know, the signal that glp1 agonists are particularly worse for lean mass retention isn't strong enough to claim that they're worse for muscle mass retention than normal dieting.
You answered your own question. “… reducing appetite…” . It’s all about CICO but also not about that. The real game-changer is the fact people don’t have to have the will power of a Zen guru to fight off the hunger pangs. That’s the 90% you should take away from this. It’s almost effortless, and that’s a huge deal. People have been proposing what you say for a 100 years and obesity only got worse. If a drug can fix it relatively safely more power to them.
I don't have any discussion on the LLM factor of this conversation, but I'll weigh in on cover letters. As a hiring manager running a fully remote team with medium-low on the pay scale, I can tell you that any open position I post is inundated with 700+ resumes. This is after initial HR filtering. There is no way realistically for me to review all of these resumes, and cover letters I will just completely ignore. I basically draw arbitrary lines in the sand to reduce resume count below 100 (college degree, no unemployment gaps, at least 2 years exp at each job), and even then it feels like throwing darts to pick a reasonable amount of candidates to interview (10-15). And don't even get me started on the candidates that don't actually have any of the experience that is on their resume, or that are googling every question I ask, or are showing up on camera in sweat pants and a tank top.
I dread interviewing and will almost always just ask my network or coworkers for referrals because posting positions online seems such a terrible way to source candidates these days.
I feel like I watch both threads casually every first of the month, and nothing felt weird or different about this one to me. I haven't ever kept track of total posts, more of the ratio between who wants to be hired posts vs who's hiring posts. Is it possible that a majority of posts aren't made on the day of the post?
The implication that is NOT said is that suddenly 20% of people were sitting around without any work to do because AI was making everyone so efficient and productive. This does not, however, seem to be the reality, based on conversations within the company. It appears we have yet another case of economic downturn disguised as increasing velocity.
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