ClickUp’s founder coined a phrase for the AI coding crash. Then he laid off 22% of staff
Key Points
- ClickUp has cut 22% of its workforce as part of a restructure CEO Zeb Evans calls the 100x organisation.
- The company is introducing $1 million cash salary bands for staff who build or run AI systems that produce "100x impact."
- Evans coined the phrase "the great reckoning of AI coding," arguing average engineers using AI slow down the best engineers.
- The remaining workforce is split into three groups: Builders, System Managers and Front-Liners.
- ClickUp is valued at around $4 billion, reported $300 million in ARR last year, and has been preparing for an IPO.
ClickUp has cut 22% of its workforce while introducing $1 million salary bands for staff who build or run AI systems.
Zeb Evans, Founder and Chief Executive at ClickUp, announced the cut in a post on X this week, framing the move as a structural bet on AI rather than a response to financial pressure.
He described what he called “the great reckoning of AI coding,” arguing that average engineers using AI tools are slowing down the best engineers rather than helping them.
The San Diego-based productivity platform, valued at around $4 billion, reported roughly $300 million in annual recurring revenue last year and acquired AI coding platform Codegen at the end of 2025.
“The common narrative is that AI makes everyone more productive. It doesn’t,” wrote Evans.
He argued that companies celebrating 500% more pull requests from AI-assisted engineers are misreading the data, because customer outcomes are not matching the volume of code being generated.
The thesis underpins what Evans calls the 100x organisation, a restructure that splits ClickUp’s remaining workforce into three groups.
The first group, Builders, covers engineers, product managers and designers who orchestrate AI agents rather than ship code or design files themselves.
The second, System Managers, are staff who automate parts of their own jobs and end up owning the AI systems that result.
The third, Front-Liners, are customer-facing staff who Evans said should spend nearly 100% of their time in meetings with customers while the systems around those meetings run on their own.
As part of this new pivot, ClickUp is introducing cash salary bands of $1 million per year for employees who produce “100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.”
Evans did not specify how many staff this applies to or what the gating criteria look like, only that the path is open to nearly anyone in the company.
This is the third workforce reduction at ClickUp in four years. The company cut 7% of staff in 2022 and laid off around 90 employees in a separate round, both framed at the time as efficiency moves ahead of a planned public listing.
ClickUp counts Booking.com, IBM, Spotify, T-Mobile and Netflix among its customers.
