More like "I need to fire everyone, how can I spin this?"

Don't forget the implicit admission that "my product can be made in claude code."

Yes; many of these supposed "flexes" are not the flex that these founders think they are.

They are probably one fork away of having a full product but open source is considered boring now.

What's weird to me is that they say 'well, with AI we need less people for the same output.'

Why is the conversation rarely framed 'with AI we will move faster and have more output'?

It feels like companies would be well served to expand their product teams and roadmaps to go bigger, but instead choose to hold the pace now with less headcount.

Less headcount usually means faster pace - less lines of comminication, less red tape etc.

Or at least that's what many C-level people believe to be true. "We need to move like a startup" is a common mantra repeated by executives, even megacorps like Amazon.

I guess it's true to some degree though, anecdotally as an IC at a tech company, I feel like I could move a lot faster if some people around me removed and replaced by an automation instead.

But that's not the claim being made. It's about only slightly lowering output or even reducing output for a much larger reduction in spending.

What they're doing is "doing less with less", as they say.

Once the dust settles around AI, I agree with you. Unless we think the collective company's backlogs are going to stop being infinite, then any extra productivity that can be gained will be gained.

With that said, I think AI is just cover for the current set of layoffs. Companies are still right sizing from the pandemic/ZIRP over-hiring. Additionally, while none will say it at the risk of angering the administration, the economic uncertainty based on how someone is feeling day to day means companies want to derisk.

The moving faster is how it would work in a good economy with investment dollars. We're in a cycle where we need excuses to lay people off so that's AIs main use case.

Reducing expenses and increasing profit NOW is the goal of shortsighted leaders.

Who cares about any other path - get rich quick!!

It feels like poor technical leadership to me. Who knows how large that team was, maybe its 2-3 people, but it also sounds like they don't know how to manage them.

The flip side is now there's nobody else to troubleshoot when the house of cards inevitably collapses. Whats he gonna do, "Hey Siri, do a security review on this codebase"?

Quantity has a quality of its own, but I feel like if its a website with an iOS app you're just vibe coding your way towards the memes, and if its something actually pushing the envelope one guy and an API key isn't going to cut it, no matter how many tokens you spit out.

Probably just trying to save face after having to close down/scale back the startup to zero.

You too can be a 1 man startup founder.

> It just came across as some of the most small-brain thinking that anyone would then "Like" this content and not see it for what it is: idiotic management and leadership and just complete lack of basic foresight.

It's not even that. It's just straight up lying. The most generous interpretation is that his "team" was Fiverr contractors who were working part-time for $10/hour. More likely is he never had a team to begin with.

You can just say things. You can just say that you've unlocked 1000x productivity gains with AI and "agentic processes" and investors and AI boosters are so eager to believe this nobody will bother fact checking it.

100% this. The culture has shifted toward normalizing lying to such a degree that now, most people will stare you in the eye and lie to your face for the sake of self-preservation. Low-trust is now the default, high-trust is a rare luxury. Most people are just demi-Barnum's now (and if they're not, their brain has been so utterly cooked by the spectacle that they may as well be running a scam relative to the lack of actual value they produce).

Best part: now the ceo can't hire because he's too busy building and debugging agents

I mean theyre probably lying so..

I can't believe anyone is that dumb