Meta's plan to replace staff with AI fell apart in four months

Meta’s AI push tripled how much code the company wrote and barely moved what it actually shipped.

Project OT

A Reuters special report published August 26, 2026 reconstructs Project OT, hatched at Zuckerberg’s leadership retreat at his Hawaii compound in January 2026. The plan was to have AI take over much of the daily work of thousands of employees and reorganize the company around it. Within months it was running into employee resistance, security problems, and Meta’s own internal numbers: code changes across its platforms and infrastructure rose 220 percent year over year, while changes that produced new or upgraded user-facing features rose just 36 percent. On the night of May 19, hours before the first layoff wave, Zuckerberg called off planning for a second round in November. The next day Meta laid off 10 percent of its employees, and he later told remaining staff he did not expect further company-wide layoffs this year.

The measurement that matters

The gap between those two percentages is the most useful published measurement of agentic coding at scale so far. Output rose massively; shipped value did not follow, because the bottleneck was never typing the code but deciding what to build and verifying what came back. AI budgets justified by lines written, pull requests merged or tickets closed are counting the 220 percent. The question worth asking is what happened to the 36.