🗜 Slowly but surely, they're tightening the screws on us.

Almost every day I see news that Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and so on are laying off hundreds and thousands of employees due to AI optimization.

You can understand them: they own servers that can be used. It's harder to understand other companies like Uber, which don't have such servers, and they're already starting to pay more for tokens than for the employees they laid off.

And then the question arises: who writes code faster and with fewer bugs—say, 3 employees or 1 operator + AI?

But why did Uber and similar companies suddenly discover that the cost of tokens isn't so small?

Because the giants have slowly started raising their prices, especially for corporate clients. OpenAI and Anthropic are already worth almost $2 trillion combined; Chinese models are not yet, but sooner or later they will be too. And it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to get investments from elsewhere, which they used to subsidize our cheap tokens. There's still the IPO, and then maybe that's it.

For them, salvation lies either in a revolution in GPUs or a revolution in energy. Or a super-evolution, if suddenly in 2–3 years they build or redistribute a bunch of nuclear power plants for them.

At the same time, right now, due to the conflict in the Middle East, GPUs and electricity are only getting more expensive.

And here's a series of events:

1. Anthropic and Microsoft have canceled the ability for corporate clients to use the same cheap subscription as individuals. Now they will have to pay only for tokens, which is up to 10x more expensive.

2. Anthropic removed Claude Code from the $20 plan, and GPT plans to do the same with Codex.

3. At the same time, on Max plans, limits are constantly fluctuating, and most often downward. True, the other day Anthropic managed to negotiate the use of SpaceX's capacities and after that increased limits on the Max subscription, but how long will that last? After all, SpaceX has its own native Grok.

On the other hand, all the programmers laid off due to AI optimization are going into creating startups. This means the user base of Codex / Claude Code / Gemini is only growing, and not at the full price of tokens, but again via subscription.

And, unfortunately, this also affects Russia: here too, many companies are already using AI agents and vibe coding.

As a result, companies' need for developers is decreasing, although some are trying, on the contrary, to move faster with the same headcount thanks to AI. On the other hand, it's becoming more expensive for these same developers to become AI entrepreneurs.

What will happen next is unknown. Someone might say that AI will become so expensive that they'll bring people back. But maybe this is exactly the case where the meat grinder doesn't work in reverse.

@oh_my_zen