The Sunday Signal | Mid-Week Flash

Wednesday, 27 May 2026. An early look at Week 22.

May 27, 2026

The full Week 22 issue lands this Sunday at thesundaysignal.ai. Subscribe so it arrives in your inbox. This issue is also available as a podcast. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube and tell me what you think.

Bottom Line Up Front

Two stories arrived this week from opposite ends of the same machine. A website builder said it no longer needs a fifth of its workforce because the AI tools its customers can now reach for directly do the work. The chief operating officer of one of the world’s largest tech companies said he cannot draw a line from his engineers’ vast AI bills to anything customers can see. The producer is being eaten. The buyer cannot find what it bought. Both stories are in Sunday’s issue.

Wix laid off the developers who built Wix

Wix confirmed on Monday it will cut around 1,000 jobs, roughly twenty per cent of its workforce. It is the largest reduction in the company’s twenty-year history. The company employed 5,277 people at the end of the first quarter, with more than sixty per cent based in Israel. The stock has lost about half its value this year. The first quarter posted a loss of $57.5 million on revenue of $541 million, with operating expenses up fifty per cent.

The headline number matters less than what management told staff. Per Israeli press reporting, internal communications were direct. Several development and design roles are no longer required because AI tools now perform that work. Wix built its business on giving non-technical users a drag-and-drop way to make a website. The engineering and design layer behind that drag-and-drop is the layer being cut.

There is one more turn. The fastest growing business inside Wix is Base44, the natural-language software-building platform it bought last year for $80 million. Its annual recurring revenue hit $150 million in May. A user types what they want. Base44 builds it. The product growing inside Wix is the product replacing the people inside Wix.

The argument no longer holds

For two decades the case for Wix was simple. Most people cannot build a website. Wix gives them a way to do it without learning code. That case rested on a particular bet, which is that the abstraction layer would remain useful, while the people building underneath it remained needed.

Both halves of that bet are now in question. The user who once needed Wix can open Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, Base44, or any of the new “type-what-you-want” tools and get a working site in minutes. The developer who once built Wix is being told the same AI tools that compete with the product now compete with the job. The platform that sat between the user and the developer no longer has obvious room on either side.

Week 22 tracker, early look

The cross-sector year-to-date total has crossed 470,000. The tech-specific count sits above 169,000. Since Sunday the trackers absorbed roughly 27,000 additions, a mix of new cuts and second-quarter reconciliations. Inside this week’s additions sit Wix’s 1,000 jobs, the next thousand realisations of WiseTech Global’s previously announced 30 per cent restructuring, and the rolling state-level WARN filings catching back-office cuts at Acrisure, Macy’s, CVS and Aetna. The year-to-date number is a tracker-based estimate and will be reconciled in Sunday’s full issue.

Uber paid for the tokens. It cannot find the features.

On Saturday, on the Rapid Response podcast, Uber’s president and chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald said in plain terms that the company’s vast use of AI coding tools is not visibly producing better consumer products. His words: “That link is not there yet.” Maybe more is shipping. Maybe it is not. He cannot trace it.

Behind the quote is the spend. Uber rolled out Claude Code to roughly 5,000 engineers in December. By March, eighty-four per cent of them were using agentic features, up from thirty-two per cent in February. By spring, ninety-five per cent of engineers used AI tools every month. Roughly seventy per cent of committed code is now AI-assisted. Heavy users rack up bills between $500 and $2,000 a month. In April, the chief technology officer disclosed that the company had already burned through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget. Four months in. Macdonald called it a “head-exploding moment”.

The internal incentive was a leaderboard. Teams were ranked by total AI tool usage. The metric being optimised was consumption. The output was tokens, not features. Macdonald has now said publicly what the design should have made obvious. If you reward people for using a tool, you get more tool use. You do not necessarily get more product. The receipt is impressive. The customer cannot see what it bought.

The buyers are starting to look at the receipts

Microsoft is reported to be cancelling most of its direct Claude Code licences and routing engineers to GitHub Copilot’s command-line tool. Duolingo’s chief executive has walked back his AI-replacement language from last year. Sam Altman has begun publicly suggesting some businesses may be using AI as a convenient label for cuts that would have happened anyway. The euphoria phase is ending. The receipts phase has begun.

For Anthropic this is mixed. Uber is one of its largest enterprise customers, and Uber’s experience proves the adoption is real. It also proves the usage-based pricing model is being aimed at companies that can blow a year’s budget in a third of a year and still struggle to explain what they got. That is not yet a customer leaving. It is a customer counting.

Coming Sunday

Two stories that are really one. Wix laid off a fifth of itself because the AI tools its users now reach for have replaced the developers inside the company that built the abstraction. Uber’s chief operating officer cannot connect his enormous AI coding spend to anything the customer sees. On one side of the market the producer is being eaten. On the other side the buyer is asking what dinner cost.

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