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