Did AI cut 290 jobs at ClickUp? Its CEO says his engineers now direct agents instead of writing code

ClickUp founder and chief executive Zeb Evans announced on 21 May 2026, in a long memo posted to his own X account and reported by The Next Web, that the company had "reduced headcount by 22%" that day - about 290 of roughly 1,300 staff, according to reporting at the time; Evans himself gave only the percentage. What makes it unusual is that he ruled out the ordinary explanation in the same breath: "The business is the strongest it's ever been", and "this wasn't about cutting costs. Most savings from this change will flow directly back into the people who stay." His stated reason is that AI has changed what the work is. "The roles required to build at the highest level are fundamentally different than they were a year ago," he wrote, and of his engineers: "the great engineers, the ones who can orchestrate, architect, and review, are becoming 100x engineers. They're not writing code. They're directing agents that write code. The skill is judgment." He describes the same collapse elsewhere: "The bottleneck of user research is gone. It takes us just one mention of an agent to kickoff research and analyze results," and says product management and design roles are merging. The savings go to those who remain, through "$1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems". Read his own conclusion carefully, because it cuts against the headline: "The future is not fewer people. It's different work, new roles, and better rewards for those who embrace it," and he points to job titles that did not exist a year ago, such as Agent Manager. That is a claim about the future. The 290 people are the present, and the reason given for their going is that agents now do what they did.