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 (80)
I love this post! 😂😂 It brings back so many memories from my startup days.
You have a call with someone at 1 PM, and they're enthusiastically sketching out this amazing long-term vision for the product. Then you have another meeting scheduled with them at 3 PM... except it never happens, because they've already been laid off in the meantime.
The post is great, but I don't "love" it - it scares the hell out of me!
Sounds like dystopia, but I'm afraid it could be true any day - makes "Brave New World" and "1984" sound like benign fairy tales ...
The only ones who should be fired are those top tier managers - it's not just about the employees, but also about the customers who get to use this "time bomb" of a platform ... totally irresponsible, but yeah, "$$$" rules!
All I can do is pray our QA team makes it through the rest of the year without getting hit. Every day feels like walking on eggshells — no one knows who's gonna be the next to just vanish.😂
Your spirit keeps you going, but of course this is terrible - stupid, stupid management! (or should I say "greedy"?)
This platform's going live for a client demo next Tuesday. I feel bad for the PM who joined last week — praying for her 🙏
I even feel bad for the customer who is getting demoed or "sold" this stuff, unknowing of what's really going on ... oh well, that's the world we live in I suppose :-|
Just to be clear, my "love" was 100% sarcastic. 😂 This is actually one of the reasons I eventually left startups for a corporate job.
Sure, corporate life has its own problems too, and it's far from perfect. But at least I haven't experienced management knowingly selling customers something they already knew was bad. To me, that's a pretty significant difference.
Haha okay, yeah I reckoned you didn't mention that completely seriously - and anyway, no matter how bad, we need to keep our sense of humor, and our ability to put things into perspective ;-)
Same thing, different place, different people — always the same damn thing. Hard to describe the feeling. Just... heavy and bitter at the same time. The office felt suffocating all afternoon. I walked out the second the clock hit the end of the day. Felt more like I was escaping than leaving.😂
Article??
Can't guarantee we'll publish today — just got some bad news. I have to go do an on-site client demo tomorrow.😱
Aww, I'm sorry to hear that. I was really looking forward to the article, but I completely understand. I hope the client demo goes well and things get better soon. We'll catch up whenever you're free. ❤️
I'm just a little tester — the PMs and ops folks are the ones fronting it. I'm chill, hahaha 🤣
What is your profession?
A QA. And since I'm the one who knows this project best, I have to be there tomorrow — if something breaks during the demo, I'm the one who needs to jump in and find the root cause on the spot.😂
Nice!!!! You are the hero of the film.lol
Hahaha, more like the scapegoat if you ask me 😅 Wish me luck!"
Haha! Good luck xulingfeng!! I’m rooting for you! If things get too tough, just tell me — I’ll send Doraemon your way.
"Activating maximum-power cat-type robot! Target locked! Target scan complete! No rats detected in the area — ready to deploy!" 😸👊🤣
🐀😱LOL
I have a question !
If someone asks about our annual income, should we share that information with them?
Depends who's asking 😅
Friend or someone in the same field — sure, why not. Helps everyone know what they're worth. Salary secrecy is only good for the company.
Random person or a recruiter you just met — not their business. "I'm doing alright" is a full answer.
Trust your gut. If it feels off, just change the subject. You don't owe anyone.
Relatives
That's the tricky one lol. I usually just say 'enough to get by' and ask them something back. Works most of the time 😅
Yes, I’ll try too, but what will you do about your own nature!
I'm the legendary keyboard warrior 🎭 Online I can command the world and talk endlessly 🌍🔥 In real life though? I'm a social anxiety queen 👻 If I could, I'd go a whole day without saying a single word 😶
How do you know? 🤔
Self-awareness is free on the internet 🤷♂️😂
I'm introvert! Hence proved!
🤣🤣🤣
Even if you talk to me face to face , still won't be able to talk.
Thank god for the internet 🙏
LoL
Yeah and of course management wont admit that firing the people who built it was a bad idea, they'll just blame the people who get tasked with fixing it for not being fast enough at it. There's a fine line between speed and efficiency and having AI just write it all is speed, not efficiency. Efficiency is using AI to build framework that you can validate, then using that framework to do a greater part of the work. Pretty much how I had set up V.A.L.I.D. Built with AI, but meticulously tested, before it was put in place anywhere. So I know I can trust the Roslyn generated code and tests to be fully accurate and that the platform is wired properly. Result is the actual gain of using AI, you have less to review. Whereas using AI for speed just means more slop to review and far more difficult fixing a bug in code that compiles right and runs right...
Here's the scary part — whoever picks this up next week is probably gonna keep using AI to pile more crap on top of the crap mountain that AI already built. The team that got laid off today didn't even have time for a handoff. Total mess.🫠
Yip... And whoever gets picked to take it on will likely soon follow, because they cant be expected to understand the codebase in any reasonable timeframe without using AI, let alone fix it. So it's a cascading event that literally cant stop, because the mandate is wrong.
Ten minutes before I clocked out, the manager came over and asked me to put together a test report for this project. So I just dumped the bug list into AI and had it generate the whole thing. Gotta say, that's pretty in line with his whole "All in AI" agenda, right? 🤣
And if he gives any issue, just tell him "You dont pay me enough to go through the 10x code produced by AI instead of people" (though you might see your way out too if you did). I mean honestly, QA is used to doing tests for 10x developer output, it's impossible to keep up anymore, because developers produce worse quality code at a 10x pace. The same amount of work from you that would cover a day's work, now barely covers an hour's throughput.
At this point, your best bet is to tell your manager if they want the QA team to pick up the pace, you need better tooling. Authorize either procurement or development for new tooling that helps you do your job better and faster. If he says 'go generate it yourself with AI', hammer him with the API bill 🤣
🤣 Oh wait, you just made me realize something — what if the company laid off the whole Super Individual team because they were burning through too many tokens and the API bill got out of hand? 😂
Probably the case 🤣 I mean think about it, when I wired in my freebie credits from Azure to run agentic coding, I ran through over $500 in 5 hours and that's using 'cheap' models... Now imagine what they did... Cuz I doubt it was just a $100 Claude subscription...
Or the trifecta:
Why bill so high? - We dont know, we just did our job.
Ok, so how does it work? - Switch on our AI so it can tell you.
Ok, no more budget, fix it. - We cant.
Obviously in more professional butt covering language, though I suspect that's about how it played out 😅
Ugh, they want us to "leverage AI" and "cut costs" at the same time. Make it make sense 😅 The struggle of working at a small company.
At this point you're going to have to part time supervise a free rotation of models for you to be a 'cost effective' employee.
Nice post 👍🏻
😂Yesterday was just... speechless.
How?
This post isn't fiction — it's what happened to me yesterday.🫠
Ohhh the burning pain! 😭 I literally gasped reading this!! Refreshing the group chat just to see everyone gone... man, my heart sank for you! Leaving QA and a brand-new PM stranded with this AI code-mountain right before a client demo is pure torture. Good luck for Tuesday, you guys are gonna need it! 🫠
Good thing I don't have to be there for the client demo. Praying for the new PM who has to go present this thing 🙏😅
Haha glad you dodged that bullet! RIP to the new PM though, praying for her!
By the way, pray for me too. I just smashed my dad's expensive monitor today because a real mouse scared the life out of me. It looks like chaos is everywhere this week.
Well, there's a saying where I'm from: out with the old, in with the new. Praying for you 🙏 Maybe you need Doraemon... wait, no. Doraemon's scared of mice too. 😂
you clearly don't know my dad! If I tell him 'out with the old', he’ll straight up say 'well, you've been around for a while too, maybe it's time to replace YOU'
Doreamon = me
Well, every family has its own struggles. Praying for you 🙏 Quick, dig through your 4D pocket and find that Time Wrapping Cloth! 😂
The detail that turns this from a layoff story into a horror story is "built from a demo, no PM, no requirements." The intent never existed anywhere durable, so the bus factor was zero from day one, not one. Code only tells you what it does, never why or whether that was the goal.
The bitter part, and you feel this as QA more than anyone: the one artifact that could have outlived the people is a real test suite, because a good test encodes what correct means independent of who wrote the code. They treated developers as expendable while building the one system where shared understanding is the whole asset, then deleted it and kept the liability.
"Having someone to fix bugs at all is a luxury" will stay with me. Hope your seat stays warm, genuinely.
Hope so. Finding a stable job in this market is rough. Gonna see how things shake out next week. The whole company's on edge after this.
That edge you are describing is its own kind of tax, it is hard to do good work while you are wondering if the ground holds. For what it is worth, the fact that you are the one who saw the whole failure clearly, wrote it up, and named exactly why it broke is the most employable thing in this whole story. That is the read a good team is desperate for. Rooting for you next week.
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.🙃
Is this real, or a story? A post-apocalyptic world where upper management is stupid enough to lay everyone off and think AI can do it all - personally I think it's a better idea to keep the employees, and replace the managers by AI ;-)
Yeah, it's real. Happened just this afternoon (my timezone). Reality's weirder than fiction. And Leob, you're spot on — we could totally extract a "management skill" with today's tech. That's more than doable.🤣
Yes haha it's probably one of the easier skills to create ;-) ... but anyway - this is bizarre!!!
This is the scenario that worries me more than any benchmark number. A platform built entirely through AI intermediaries with no PM and no requirements doc is not really documented anywhere, it only exists implicitly in whatever context window generated it, and that context disappears the moment the people who ran those sessions leave. I have started treating every PR an agent generates the way I would treat a contractor's handoff, reading the diff line by line while I still remember why I asked for it, because six months from now there may be no one left who can explain a decision that only ever existed inside a chat log. The scary part is not that AI wrote the code, it is that nobody ever translated the reasoning behind it into something a human could inherit.
Your approach of leaving a one-liner in every agent-generated PR is the most practical fix I've seen so far. As for where this is all heading — I guess we're both watching to find out.
This made me think. I think preserving context will become just as important as generating code. Without that, we risk solving today's bug while making tomorrow's debugging much harder. Great read.
Always keep a backup. You never know what's gonna hit you next.🫠
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.🫠