Meta's leadership drafted "Project OT" in January to slash team sizes by 60% using AI to replace human work, planning massive layoffs in May and November. Zuckerberg canceled the November phase at the last minute after employee backlash, but the May 10% layoff plus AI reassignments still damaged productivity and morale.

• Meta executives visited Asian AI startups and became convinced smaller "AI-native" teams (3-5 people) could do the work of 10-20 person teams, driving a plan that would have cut the company far deeper than the 2022-2023 25% layoff.
• The actual May layoff plus reassigning 20-30% of engineers to AI labeling work caused immediate problems: critical domain knowledge disappeared, teams couldn't handle workload, and embarrassing outages occurred (like the Instagram zero-auth password reset bug affecting Barack Obama's account).
• Smaller teams create real operational risks—reduced redundancy for sick days or vacation, inadequate on-call capacity, no "slack time" for innovation, and fewer opportunities for junior engineers to learn from experienced colleagues.