I worked at a small company that laid off everyone in dev and project management that had worked there for longer than a year (they had decided to do a full rewrite and outsource it to a vendor with industry knowledge. That hasn't turned out well, but that's a different story). The only benefit is that because you have so much less capacity, the dev(s) get the ability to cut scope and concentrate only on the things that matter. In particular, work should be concentrated on automating day to day work. Anything that interrupts that one dev will be expensive by nature