That does happen. Obviously no programmers employed at those companies to talk about it on HN though.
Hire a team to build a project, when it's finally satisfied most of your requirements, you progressively cut staff until only Jim is left, and Jim spends the next two decades maintaining the system, growing out his hair and beard, piling kludge on top of kludge, and drinking heavily until retirement.
The HN bubble, focused so intently on BigTech and FAANG, is woefully unaware of how things work basically everywhere else.
Pre-musk, links to random tweets seemed to load almost instantly. Now?
Last time I tried, took 48 seconds to show a "please login or create account" message.
My Performa 5200 in the 1990s booted up faster than that.
If he'd kept things as is, without fiddling, that would've been an improvement over what he actually did.
Still, I'm glad he reduced my compulsive use of the service.
The rate of change could make the short term bumpy as companies try to play around with less dev work. Eventually though competition will push companies to raise their productivity to the new baseline (programmers + AI).
One thing that is a danger is if devs ignore what's happening in AI. I remember when Google first came out having to learn the art of querying Google to get what I was looking for. AI/LLMs looks to be the same - ignore learning how to leverage them at your own peril.