Wes Winder, a Canadian software developer, has turned into a global sensation after he decided to fire his development team and replace it with AI tools. Winder first used social media to brag about the decision, claiming that this decision enabled him to “ship 100X faster with code that’s 10X cleaner.” Earlier such aggressiveness would have earned clout for him, but now it has boomeranged, and he is a meme on Reddit.

The tweet read, “I fired my entire dev team. Replaced them with O1, Lovable, and Cursor. Now I ship 100X faster with code that’s 10X cleaner. Open AI o3 is coming, and 90% of dev jobs won’t survive.”

But, would you believe it, Winder later took to LinkedIn to announce that he needed web developers to join his company. This disparity invited a lot of derision, the Reddit post even having nearly 10K upvotes and comments. Another raged: So he is saying his company is an unneeded greed mongrel milking a simple interaction between his clients and OpenAI! Another said, “I just say AI to do it all.” But can’t someone else just tell AI to do everything? You don’t understand. I meet with the clients! I’m a people person, dammit!”


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It brings into focus a larger problem for the tech industry today, which looks to overcompensate for its reliance on AI with a reckless disregard for the importance of human experience. For all the ways that AI can benefit developers by taking on the mundane and optimizing the useful, AI can’t replace a developer. Creativity and problem-solving abilities, decision-making that are a part of strategic thinking, cannot be duplicated by AI or human engineers.