About The Last Programmers

On February 27, 2026, Jack Dorsey posted a note to Block's 10,000 employees. He was cutting nearly half of them — over 4,000 people gone in a single day. Not because the company was failing. Gross profit was growing. Customers were increasing. Profitability was improving. His reason was blunt: "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." This wasn't a startup running out of money. This was a profitable public company saying out loud what everyone in tech had been whispering: AI doesn't just help programmers work faster — it makes you need fewer of them. There had been signs before. Amazon restructuring. Google admitting AI writes 25% of its new code. Junior developer job postings dropping 40%. Freelance coding rates falling. But Block was different. Forty percent. One day. CEO explicitly saying: this is because of AI. Two days later, on March 1, 2026, The Last Programmers went live. Not as a reaction to one layoff. But because that layoff made something undeniable: we are watching the end of programming as a mass profession, in real time. And someone needs to document it — not from a boardroom, but from the trenches.