I Fired My Product Team and Replaced Them with AI

It was the only way forward

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.

To me, the solution was clear: More AI. Maximum AI.

But the people I had hired to work at my AI startup were not AI true believers. So I fired them all.

Stop evangelizing, I told myself. Start doing.

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.

While others think about AI "features," we're inventing a new AI-native process for developing software:

1. Create AI tools to help us understand the codebase

2. Leverage AI to simplify the system and delete unnecessary parts

3. Unlock superhuman shipping velocity

Six months ago, I wasn’t writing code; I was the idea guy.

Last week, I shipped Flatty, an open-source tool that transforms any codebase into a plain text format AI models can understand and reason over in entirety.

This week, I am building a tool to accurately¹ map out our sprawling codebase in exquisite detail, making it comprehensible to both humans and LLMs.

Some will call me crazy. Good. The future belongs to the crazy ones - to the AI maximalists who are willing to rethink everything, to live agentically. Everyone else is a dinosaur. The asteroid has already hit; the blast wave just hasn’t landed yet.

For TalkTastic, the choice is existential.

Either we accelerate or we die.

Either we accelerate with AI, or we fade into obscurity.

But it's bigger than just us. As a species, we face convergent existential risks: climate change, population collapse, etc. The only way out is through - to accelerate technological progress until we achieve escape velocity.

The next few months will be a radical experiment in AI-maxxing. If it works, we'll create a new kind of company. If not, at least we tried. The old ways aren't working.

1. Ensuring accuracy is the real challenge here. It’s a mega challenge. Fortunately, I have some tricks up my sleeve. 👀