You ask a great question. My sense is that the engineers fell into three camps (as they do here on HN as well):
1) I don’t really like these AI tools I write better code anyway and they just slow me down
2) I like these tools they make me 10% faster but they’re more like spell check / autocomplete for me than life-changing and I don’t want to go all in on agentic coding, etc and I still want to hand write everything, and:
3) I am no longer writing code, I am using AI tools (often in parallel) to write code and I am acting like an engineering manager / PM instead of an IC.
For better or for worse, and there is much to debate about this, I think he wanted just the (3) folks and a handful of (2) folks to try and salvage things otherwise it wasn’t worth the burn :(
1) I don’t really like these AI tools I write better code anyway and they just slow me down
2) I like these tools they make me 10% faster but they’re more like spell check / autocomplete for me than life-changing and I don’t want to go all in on agentic coding, etc and I still want to hand write everything, and:
3) I am no longer writing code, I am using AI tools (often in parallel) to write code and I am acting like an engineering manager / PM instead of an IC.
For better or for worse, and there is much to debate about this, I think he wanted just the (3) folks and a handful of (2) folks to try and salvage things otherwise it wasn’t worth the burn :(