npm uninstall humans

In software, a dependency is a risk you accept. It’s a package you didn’t write, maintained by someone you’ve never met, that can break your entire application if it disappears. Good engineering means knowing which dependencies are worth the risk and which ones aren’t. Right now, I’m watching our industry decide that people aren’t worth it. It feels like the teams that build things are just another package to be evaluated, flagged, or uninstalled.

This week, Jack Dorsey’s Block laid off more than 4,000 people. Nearly half the company is gone. The stock jumped 24%. Dorsey told the remaining employees that most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year and make similar structural changes. Before that, Amazon cut 16,000 corporate roles. Chegg gutted 45% of its staff. HP announced plans to cut up to 6,000 positions. Every single one of these moves was framed as an “AI efficiency” play. Significantly smaller teams. Leaner operations. The future.

I’ve been building for the web for a long time. Long enough to have seen multiple cycles of “this technology will change everything.” And some of them did. But I’ve never seen one where the pitch is this blunt: we are removing people and replacing them with software, and we think you should be excited about it. As someone who’s in the codebase every day, who has worked alongside people doing real, solid work only to watch them get let go, this one hits different. And if you’re a web worker right now, I know you’re feeling it too.

Refactoring the Workforce

The language around these cuts is telling. “Significantly smaller teams.” “Restructuring for AI.” It’s the vocabulary of refactoring, applied to people. And it reveals something ugly about how the people making these decisions think about the folks doing the work: we’re not assets to lead, mentor, or invest in. We’re bottlenecks to be optimized away at the first opportunity. Honestly, it’s gross.

But here’s what that framing misses entirely: the people and their teams are the platforms. The companies, codebases, and products are just the artifacts. The real platform, the thing that makes a product actually work, is the people who understand it. They hold the context, and these days, context is everything. They carry the intent. They know why a decision was made, not just what the decision was. Strip them out, and you don’t have a leaner company. You have a company, product, or codebase with no one left who understands it.

When you move the people who help build your product away from the foundational work, that’s not optimization. That’s a platform failure. You’re not reducing friction. You’re removing the people who understood where the friction came from in the first place.

This is the dependency trap. Someone looked at an org chart the way an engineer looks at a bloated package.json file and decided to rip things out. But people aren’t packages. You can’t just swap in an AI module and expect the same output, no matter how good the LLMs are getting.

Frictionless Fantasy

There’s this fantasy going around right now: the frictionless company. Small teams, AI-augmented, shipping at scale with minimal overhead. It sounds clean on a slide deck. In practice, it ignores everything that actually makes a product work.

Institutional knowledge. The connective tissue of company culture. The engineer who remembers why that weird edge case exists, or why the team decided against a particular API pattern three years ago. The person who knows that a feature looks simple but took six iterations to get right. The colleague who mentored you when you were new and didn’t know what you didn’t know. You can’t run npm install for that knowledge. You can’t prompt your way into it. It lives in the people who showed up every day and did the work, and when they are replaced with a fancy autocomplete, it’s gone.

When you treat people as interchangeable npm packages, you lose the thing that made them valuable: they were the platform. They weren’t just writing code or building a product. They were the reason any of it made a damn bit of sense. They carried context that no onboarding doc or AI summary can replicate. You wouldn’t rip a critical package out of production without understanding what depends on it. But that’s exactly what’s happening in this new AI era. And stripping them out in the name of efficiency creates a different kind of debt. Call it human debt. It compounds the same way technical debt does, quietly and then all at once, except nobody’s tracking it on a Linear board.

Intent vs. Output

AI is really damn good at generating output. Code, copy, designs. I use it every day, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But output without intent is just loud noise.

AI doesn’t fight for accessibility or correct implementation. It doesn’t push back on a PM about a dark pattern. It doesn’t sit in a meeting and say “this is going to hurt our users” when everyone else is nodding along. It does what it’s told. That’s useful, but it’s not stewardship.

Stewardship is the people who see a feature request and think about the user on the other end of it. The folks who build with empathy baked in, not because a linter told them to, but because they’ve been shipping long enough to understand what’s at stake. A product’s soul doesn’t live in the code. It lives within the people who care enough to fight for it. That intent is the human dependency that holds everything together. It’s the package you can’t find on any open source registry or have a robot generate from a poorly written prompt. And it’s the first thing that disappears when you “refactor” a team down to a skeleton crew.

The Communication Vacuum

What makes all of this worse is how it’s communicated. Or rather, how it isn’t.

There was a time when being a leader and leadership meant advocating for the people doing the work. Now it feels like leadership means only auditing them. Reviewing the roster the way you’d review a package-lock.json. What can we flag? What can we drop? What’s the minimum viable team we can get away with? Somewhere along the way, leading people turned into looking down and deciding who’s worth keeping.

4,000 people lose their jobs, and the stock jumps 24%. Record profits in the same quarter you eliminate half your workforce. And the message to those still at their desks? “We’re moving faster now.” No acknowledgment of what was lost. You just forced to disagree and commit. Oh yeah, and btw, you need to hurry up.

The anxiety this is creating in our industry goes beyond job security. It’s the slow realization that the people making these decisions don’t see us as people. They see us as a third-party dependency to be evaluated and potentially removed. That changes how you show up every day. It changes whether you fight for the thing that needs fighting for, or keep your head down because you don’t want to be the next module that gets uninstalled. And honestly? That is corrosive to us all. It eats at the exact qualities that made you good at your job in the first place.

Human Dependency

I’m not anti-AI. I think these tools are powerful, and I use them to do better work. But there’s a real difference between using AI to help people improve or perform better and using AI as a justification to remove them entirely. It’s a scapegoat and helps those at the top dodge any real accountability.

The human dependency isn’t a bug. It’s a feature and the entire point. We build products for people, and it takes people to know what that means. The judgment to get it right and the empathy to care whether we do: that comes from being human. From the ones in the trenches. The ones who are actually the entire platform.

So the next time someone frames a layoff as “AI efficiency,” ask yourself what’s actually being optimized away. Because it’s probably not friction. It’s most likely the people who actually gave a damn.

If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of it, just know you’re not alone. A lot of us are sitting with this same knot in our stomachs, watching the industry we love and we’ve helped build move in a direction that doesn’t seem to love us back. It leaves a hole that no robot will be able to fill, and that’s a damn shame.