Meta counted the code its agents wrote, then cancelled the layoffs

Put Bosworth's two figures over each other. Internal code changes running at 3.2 times last year's rate against user-facing changes at 1.36 times means each unit of shipped change now drags about 2.35 times the internal churn it did a year ago, a rise of roughly 135% ^[17]. The agents produced work, and most of the work landed on Meta's own platforms and infrastructure rather than in anything a user could open ^[3][4].

The incident line behaves the same way. Major technical and security incidents rose 40% year over year, while the hours staff burned putting them out rose 70% ^[5][6]. Divide those and each incident cost about 21% more time to close than an incident a year earlier ^[18]. Volume went up and so did difficulty, which is what the April internal post describing unchecked agents taking "large-scale, disruptive actions that humans are unlikely to execute" would predict ^[7]. When a person breaks something, there is a person who remembers doing it.

Worth noting where the 220% came from: Meta's own CTO, in an early June post ^[3]. The velocity number was not produced by a critic. Reuters reports that executives were separately seeing "reliability warning signs" caused by the coding surge [c7b]. Sanchit Vir Gogia of Greyhound Research puts the failure in sequencing rather than credulity, saying Meta "booked a forecast as capacity" and budgeted an improvement that had not yet arrived in production ^[9]. His order of operations is prove the action, then widen the authority, then remove the human control ^[10].

Terra Higginson of Info-Tech Research Group makes the measurement point plainly: output should not stand in as a proxy for productivity, and what she is seeing is action without the outcome anyone wanted ^[11]. Justin Greis of Acceligence says AI can make an organisation extraordinarily busy without making it more productive ^[12]. Then, in the same write-up of a productivity forecast that collapsed under audit, Conifers.ai's Tom Findling suggests telling the board that you may not get a 500% boost but IT can show a way to 300% ^[16]. The multiple changed. The habit of quoting one before the capability exists did not.

The employee-side detail is the one that will travel. After the April mandate to install tracking software on US employees' devices to capture keystrokes and mouse clicks, teaching agents to replicate how humans use a computer, staff rebelled on the reasonable suspicion that they were training their replacements ^[13]. Meta's remedy was more travel and social spending plus better snacks in the office microkitchens, and morale did not move ^[14].

One caveat sits under all of it. These are Reuters' readings of Meta's internal posts ^[2], and a company that halted a plan to cut up to 60% of some teams on the strength of its own dashboards has not shown anyone the dashboards ^[1].