Person
Longtime Meta executive and head of operations, one of the company's most senior leaders shaping internal structure and strategy.
Project OT would have cut some teams by 60 percent. Meta's own numbers showed incidents up 40 percent and the time spent on them up 70, and Zuckerberg killed the second wave.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Project OT scoped cutting some teams by as much as 60 per cent and handing their work to AI agents. Meta executed a single 10 per cent layoff instead, after internal data showed the agents were not delivering the hoped-for productivity gains.
Reality
Reuters reports that Meta's OT plan modelled cutting some teams by 60 percent and putting small human crews over agent workflows, while internal indicators said the agents were not delivering the productivity the plan assumed.
Reality
Reuters reporting on Project OT, relayed by the Pragmatic Engineer, shows Meta's reduction target was fixed in January while the productivity claim underneath it was still untested in May, and half the plan ran anyway.
Reality
The plan assumed smaller teams would work as well as before, which is a bet on 2.5 times the output per head. The version that actually shipped, a 10% layoff plus infra engineers seconded to labeling, left outages behind.
Reality
Project OT put individual teams in line for cuts of up to 60% on the assumption that agents would absorb the work. By May the internal productivity read had turned. The second wave never got a total.
Reality
Meta's own telemetry showed its agents producing far more internal churn than shipped features, plus more incidents to clean up. That is the strongest evidence yet that agent programmes do not cash out as headcount.
Reality
Meta worked backwards from a 60% team-cut scenario to a May and November schedule, then cancelled one wave hours before the first. The design failed ahead of the technology, and the ordering is the lesson.
Reality