The AI-First Alibi: Late July 2026
304 words • 2 min readWHEN "AI-FIRST" MEANS "HUMANS LAST"
Late July delivered two casualties that show the two faces of the AI cull. One company blamed an "AI-first vision" while cutting a fifth of its staff — then insisted AI had nothing to do with it. The other quietly killed its own AI product to herd users toward a newer one. Different mechanisms, same graveyard.
🛑 Monday.com (600 Jobs, "AI-First")
On July 23, work-management platform Monday.com disclosed in an SEC filing that it is cutting ~600 employees — about 20% of its workforce — as it restructures around an "AI-first" operating model. Co-founder Eran Zinman insisted the cuts "were not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI." Yet a fifth of the company is gone, the restructuring carries a $45–55M charge, and the stated destination is a "leaner" org built around an AI-driven growth strategy. Whether AI wielded the axe or merely justified it, the roles are equally dead.
🛑 Google Gemini Code Assist (Eaten by Antigravity)
On July 17, Google went dark on the consumer tier of Gemini Code Assist — its free AI coding assistant — retiring three products at once: the GitHub review bot, the IDE extensions, and the standalone Gemini CLI. Barely a year after making them free to court individual developers, Google pulled the plug to funnel everyone toward Antigravity, its newer agentic CLI. The enterprise tier lives; the free one dies. It is AI cannibalism: a first-gen AI product retired not by a rival, but by its own maker's next model.
The alibi of 2026 is "AI-first." Sometimes it means agents did the work. Sometimes it just means the humans — or the older AI — were in the way.
Status: 600 Cut + 3 Products Killed | Trend: The "AI-First" Restructuring Source: KilledByAI Intelligence Terminal