AI is changing how Silicon Valley gets its work done.

Kalley Huang, A.I. Could Change the World. But First It Is Changing Silicon Valley. New York Times, Apr. 2, 1016.

But nearly four years after OpenAI lit the A.I. boom with its ChatGPT chatbot, the one industry that is unquestionably being disrupted by this once-in-a-generation technology shift is the tech industry itself.

Tech workers, it is becoming clear, have been building their A.I. replacements. The profitable business models of software companies are also threatened by A.I. Even the way companies are built is being turned inside out, as tiny shops use A.I. to build apps and software that would have taken dozens of skilled programmers just a few years ago.

“Silicon Valley is this really interesting petri dish right now of all of this change and transformation,” said Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, a company that makes software for storing and managing data.

Generative A.I. made by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google can do many things. The one task it has become particularly good at is computer programming. That has given many tech companies the chance to start cleaning house, even if executives stop short of saying that’s what they’re doing.

One reason chatbots are good a programming is that the (syntactic) correctness of a program is readily verified by the chatbot itself. That's not true for most intellectual tasks.

So far this year, more than 70 tech companies have eliminated at least 40,000 jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks job cuts in the industry. Block, the financial services company that owns Square, Cash App and Tidal, laid off 40 percent of its work force in February, or about 4,000 employees.

“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” Jack Dorsey, Block’s top executive, wrote in a social media post.

Large scale job loss and transformation in tech:

The layoffs have contributed to tech hubs like San Francisco — the home of OpenAI and Anthropic — not seeing the job growth characteristic of prior booms, Mr. Egan said. From 2022 through 2025, when the most recent data was available, San Francisco County lost about 30,000 tech jobs, according to data from the Census Bureau. It added roughly that number of jobs during the dot-com era and a start-up funding frenzy between 2020 and 2022.

That decline is visible across the country, too. Nationwide, tech jobs declined by about 150,000 from 2022 through 2025.

“The tech labor pool and talent pool is definitely reassembling,” Mr. Egan said. “A.I. is a big reason for that.” [...]

Part of tech’s reassembly is happening at start-ups. Gone is the traditional process of raising a boatload of venture capital funding, not worrying about revenue or profit and hiring heavily. Today’s start-ups are tapping A.I. tools like agents — personal assistants that can take actions on their own — to make money and grow with fewer employees.

There's more at the link.