The Tools That Just Replaced 40% of Block's Workforce Are Free in Your Browser
Jack Dorsey cut 40% of Block. Zuckerberg may cut 20% of Meta. The tools they're using to do it are the same ones in your browser tab right now.
Let me be honest with you: I find the current AI layoff conversation scary and exciting in equal measure, and I don’t think either reaction is wrong.
Jack Dorsey just cut 40% of Block’s workforce. Four thousand people. He didn’t blame the economy or a bad quarter — gross profit is growing. He said AI tools now let a smaller team do more, predicted that most companies would follow within a year, and Block’s stock rose 17% on the announcement. Then last week, Fortune reported that Zuckerberg is “poised to finish what Dorsey started.” Meta is reportedly weighing a 20% cut — over 15,000 people. Analysts are already writing pieces titled “Meta’s 20% Layoff Rumor Is Coming For These Companies Next.”
I’m in my early-mid-40s. I’m watching people around me — people who’ve had genuinely good careers — losing their jobs and having to re-figure out their lives from the ground up. Their relationships, the way they raise their kids, their homes, their lifestyles — all of it built around a salary that just evaporated. There is nothing not scary about that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But here’s the thing that most of the coverage is missing entirely:
The AI tools that are enabling companies to cut 20-40% of headcount are the same tools you already have access to. OpenAI. Claude. Perplexity. The same stack. The same leverage. The companies doing the cutting aren’t using some proprietary technology locked behind a corporate firewall. They’re using the tools you can sign up for this afternoon.
Which means you have a choice about which side of this math you’re on.
I’ve run my own business since my early 20s. Never had the golden handcuffs, which means I’ve also never had the safety net. Something works until it doesn’t, and then you figure out what’s next — usually without a plan B. In 2020, I was running an events company. COVID happened. I didn’t have a contingency plan for a global pandemic that made in-person gatherings illegal. No one did.
So I pivoted. I launched a virtual experience company, and what started as survival turned into something more exciting and more lucrative than the original business ever would have been. That events company is still running today, alongside an interactive photo and video agency with a SaaS product. None of that exists without the pressure of total disruption forcing me to move.
Necessity is the mother of invention. The companies cutting headcount right now are applying that pressure to their employees. The question is whether you let it happen to you, or whether you get ahead of it.
I want to tell you about a friend who messaged me yesterday.
He has a trail camera that’s accumulated something like 80,000 photos. He suspected most of them weren’t worth looking at — motion-triggered shots of nothing, middle-of-the-night false alarms — and he was curious whether he could build something to sort through them automatically. He’d never used Claude before. He asked me if I thought he could “vibe code it” — and I gave him the same advice I give everyone.
Less than an hour later, he sent me a screenshot of a working prototype.
He went from zero to functional app in under sixty minutes, with no prior experience. Is it perfect? No. Will it work at scale? He’s going to find out. But he had an idea, he sat down, and now he has a thing that didn’t exist before. That’s the shift most people aren’t computing yet.
Here’s where I think people go wrong when they sit down with these tools.
They open ChatGPT or Claude and type: “I want to build a thing that does a thing.” And then they’re frustrated when the output feels generic or misses the point. The problem isn’t the tool — it’s the context. These models don’t know who you are, what you’ve already tried, what you’re afraid of, or what success actually looks like for you. You have to give them that.
The prompt that actually works looks more like this:
“Hi — I’m [name]. Here’s who I am and what I do day-to-day. Here’s what I’m worried about. Here’s an idea I’ve been sitting on for years that I’ve never done anything with. Can you help me figure out how to start, and put together a one-month plan with five hours a week?”
That’s it. Context first, then the ask. You’re not just issuing commands — you’re giving the model enough to actually work with. When I started doing this, the quality of what I got back changed completely. It started feeling less like talking to a search engine and more like talking to someone who understood what I was actually trying to do.
I use this for my day job building Pictor.pro — I own product and I’m constantly in “version 1000” mode, already thinking about where something needs to go while my developers are still building version 1.0. AI has been the bridge that lets me translate my version-1000 brain into version-1.0 language. I give it my big chaotic vision, and it helps me backtrack to the foundational steps we need to build first. That’s not a parlor trick. That’s genuinely changed how I work.
I want to give you one more framing before I get to the practical breakdown.
When digital cameras came out, a lot of film photographers treated it like an attack on something they loved. I was a film photographer who got excited about digital — not because I was giving up on analog, but because it was a new tool to play with. Two different things, both interesting, both worth your time.
I see AI the same way. Yes, the macro picture is complicated, and yes, there are real people whose livelihoods are being disrupted right now. That’s true and worth sitting with. But the tool itself — the actual capability sitting in your browser tab — is genuinely exciting in a way I haven’t felt about new technology in a long time.
My honest advice: think of it like an RPG. Open the game. Make a character. See what you can build in your after-hours time before anyone is counting on it. Get excited. Because the barrier that used to exist between “I have an idea” and “this thing works” — the one that used to cost six to twelve months and a hundred thousand dollars — is mostly gone now.
You don’t even have to build something for market. Build it because you want it. That’s where the fun is. That’s where the learning happens. And if you end up building something that turns out to be useful to other people? Well. That’s where the story gets interesting.
The practical part — the actual stack I’d build if I were starting a one-person company tomorrow, including the tools, the real costs, and what it can actually produce — is in this week’s paid post.
If you’re a free subscriber and you’re reading this and it landed, that’s the piece you want. It’s the “what do I actually do this week” answer.
Unlock the one-person company stack →
The One-Person Company Stack
What follows is for paid subscribers. Here’s the before/after — the specific tasks, what they used to cost me in time or money, and what they look like now.
