A growing number of layoffs are being tied to AI, and one founder is poking fun at the boilerplate explanations companies keep using.
Loading audio narration…
Tuomas Artman, the cofounder of software company Linear, shared a hiring announcement dressed up in the language of those all-too-familiar layoff announcements.
“Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce,” he wrote in a Friday post on X.
“This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.”
By Friday morning, the post had been viewed more than 270,000 times and had gotten hundreds of comments. Many of them were from people enquiring about roles, suggesting the stunt had done its job.
Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring.…
— Tuomas Artman (@artman) May 8, 2026
Linear’s careers page shows 17 open roles. A company spokesperson told Business Insider it has 25 open positions and that it plans to open up more positions in the second half of the year.
Companies including Snap, Block, Coinbase, and Cloudflare have announced layoffs that cited AI as a factor in recent months. Many companies say they are able to operate with smaller teams because of the efficiency gains from AI — and often use similar language to convey this point.
The language has become so familiar that Business Insider’s Dan DeFrancesco made a Mad Libs for AI-driven layoff announcements.
Unlike its rival Atlassian, which cited AI when cutting 10% of its workforce in March, Linear has not publicly announced layoffs in its seven-year history.
However, Linear — which makes tools for software engineers — has a notably smaller head count compared to Atlassian and others that have made cuts. Linear employs 141 people, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. Atlassian employed about 16,000 people prior to its recent round of cuts.
Artman told Business Insider he’s “skeptical” when layoffs are attributed to AI.
“If you’ve hired the right people and kept your bar high, AI will make that team more capable,” he said in emailed comments. “Given the choice between doing more with the same team or doing the same amount with a smaller team, I don’t see why any company that genuinely has both options would choose the latter.”
Of course, there’s always the risk that a gutsy social media post can come back to bite you. As one X user replied to Artman, Linear could get “flayed” for his post if the company makes layoffs in the future.
“I know, but I’ll take the blame if this were to happen,” Artman replied.
