Trying to get my head around this. It must mean 90% of what they were doing was writing code. Like not even thinking, architecture, gathering requirements, make sure you built the right thing etc. Just generating syntax.

In my experience it's usually a few devs doing the most of that, and the rest are largely banging out features, debugging, refactoring. There's also just a lot more efficiency when you shrink the team.

> They were good

So why wouldn't you keep them? If you're able to produce even more with AI enabled engineers, why downsize? To me, it sounds like a startup's dream to be able to output more without increasing headcount.