Nowhere did they indicate there is less work to do, in fact quite the opposite.
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.
Required for what? If your goal is growth, and AI really is improving productivity of every employees that uses it, then why would you fire anyone?
Hiring 1 developer instead of 3 is not the same cost as firing 2 developers.
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.
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
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?