We've been testing a new project this week.
The project's origin story is a mess. Upper management used AI to generate an HTML demo, then handed it to a team called "Super Individual Department" — a pure-AI coding unit they'd set up a few months ago. No product manager, no requirements doc. They just fed the demo to an AI, the AI spat out a platform, and suddenly there was a product.
Last week the company finally hired a PM — to write requirements for a platform that already exists. Our QA team then wrote test cases based on those retroactively-written requirements. Then we started testing.
Yes, it's as ridiculous as it sounds. But it was running. The driving force behind it was our manager — a few weeks ago he sat us down and told us QA wasn't embracing AI fast enough, that we weren't aligned with the company's All-in-AI policy. Looking back, he's not wrong. We weren't keeping up. Just probably not the way he meant.
Testing was chaos. Network issues, random platform errors, things that worked in the morning broke in the afternoon. But bugs got fixed — the Super Individual team was responsive, fast even. I remember thinking: "this workflow is insane, but at least it's a closed loop."
Then, just now.
I filed a bug. Sat there waiting for the status to change. Nothing. Checked again. Nothing. I opened the group chat — every single person from the Super Individual Department was gone.
Empty.
I asked around.
"Company just laid off the whole Super Individual team."
All of them. Every one.
I didn't know what to say.
Not because they were fixing bugs fast — but because every line of code in this project was written by them. Or, more accurately, generated by AI through them. Without them, this platform wouldn't exist as a thing at all. And today, the platform is still here. They're not.
I don't know who's going to pick up the open tickets now. I don't know what the PM who joined last week is thinking, writing requirements for a platform with no engineering team behind it.
But I do know one thing:
A few hours ago, I was complaining about yet another bug. Now I realize — having someone to fix bugs at all is a luxury.
P.S. English isn't my first language. I use AI to polish the writing. Thanks for reading. ☕ Buy me a coffee
Top comments (11)
The line that stuck: "having someone to fix bugs at all is a luxury." I'm on the other side of the same setup, and it worries me for a different reason than the layoff.
I'm a non-developer who's built a pile of internal tools with AI — every line generated through me, same as that department. The vanishing risk in my case isn't a pink slip; it's that the context lives in a chat session that ends, or in my head, and neither ships with the code. So the discipline I've forced on myself is leaving a plain-language file next to every tool: what it is, what it's allowed to touch, and the specific ways it has already broken. Not for some future maintainer who may never arrive — for the version of me, or the next AI session, that opens it cold in six months with none of the memory that built it.
Your post is the sharp version of a question I don't think most of us building this way have answered: when the intermediary between the AI and production disappears, what did they leave behind that isn't just running code nobody understands? "Still here, and they're not" is exactly the gap a bus-factor-of-one fills with silence.
My head's still spinning. One minute you're locked in, pushing through, and then — whoosh — all the energy just drains out of you. Can't even put it into words. I've been doing this long enough to know better, but man, it still hits you in a weird way.🫠
That whoosh is real, and I don't think knowing better ever softens it — if anything it hits harder, because you see it coming and still can't brace. I've got a hands-on day job and build these tools on the side, so I know the drain that isn't about hours; it's about what you just watched happen. Writing the post was you processing something genuinely strange — not a small thing. Take the rest. It's earned. 🫠
Thanks. Pretty sure I'm gonna be stuck in this headspace until I clock out. One and a half hours to go. Just gotta push through.🙃
This is crazy. Is the platform still running even though there’s no one left to fix the bugs?
Just to check, this isn’t another one of your great stories, right? This actually happened? 😅
Yeah, this one's real. Just happened. I'm literally staring at the platform right now — using AI to test AI. That's how I found a window to write the post. Suddenly just feels... exhausting. Yeah.🫠
Which bug do you want to fix?
I don't know. This is the kind of bug that goes way beyond software.
🫠
🤣 lmao. Impossible is nothing. There's always a way out.
Haha yeah😂, reality's even more absurd than the AI horror stories I write. Just gotta keep moving forward.👊
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