I Fired My Product Team and Replaced Them with AI
We have product-market fit with a core group of power users. What we also have: a spaghetti monster of a codebase, the complexity of which exceeds human working memory. We fix one thing only to break three others. The system's intricacy has reached a point where no single engineer can understand it in any reasonable timeframe.
For months, I tried to convince our product team to go all-in on AI. "It's just a tool, like any other," they said. "Don't tell me how to do my job," they said.
But they were missing something fundamental: When complexity exceeds human comprehension, you need more than just tools - you need to enhance your own intelligence to survive. You need to become superhuman.
I watched talented engineers struggle. "Just give me time," they'd say. "We have to solve this one bug at a time." Our lead macOS engineer wanted a month just to draw a diagram of the system. A month to document! We don't have a month to write documentation.
Now it’s just me, a cracked AI researcher-engineer colleague I’ve known for years, and an ensemble of the world's best AI models: Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and o1.
