Why the "10x developer" idea is dangerous

The thought of downsizing a team to just a few—or even just one—sounds like a dream. Why have a team of hundreds when a team of dozens with AI can do the same job? This whole idea of the "10x developer" is dangerous and there's no good outcome to it.

Hiring one developer to do the work of 10 people sounds like a dream

Fewer people and more output? It sounds like a corporation's dream scenario

Every company's dream is to have the fewest people possible hired while they output more than any one person reasonably should It's the best return on investment they can get, right? That seems to be the idea behind the 10x developer idea.

With modern advancements in technology and the introduction of AI-powered programming, companies have been laying off developers left and right to let fewer people do the same job that it used to take a ton of people to do. I'll admit, the idea is definitely intriguing and it almost works.

Game studios are using AI to replace fired development teams left and right. Even Amazon has downsized its development workforce in favor of using AI.

So, why shouldn't companies fire hundreds or thousands of people and replace them with a few developers that know how to use AI, where each person outputs 10 times the work of a normal human? It sounds like a dream, right?

The nightmare begins when that one developer is on vacation and a system breaks

All it takes is one person to go on vacation for the entire system to crumble

Imagine this: a company has 20 developers on their team and decides to downsize to just two with AI. One developer takes a vacation, and that one person is responsible for the internal systems side of the business. That developer knows the entire platform inside and out, how it ticks, what issues it has, and how to fix it when it goes down.

The other developer is a great developer, but only focuses on the frontend services, not the backend. That developer knows none of the code that's used to run the backend. The backend crashes, systems go down, and the company comes grinding to a halt while the frontend developer stops their work to try and fix the backend.

This might sound like a nightmare scenario—and it is—but it's not an uncommon problem. I've seen numerous reports over the last few years of something like this playing out in companies small and large. They replace large workforces with just a few people, and the entire system crumbles when someone goes on vacation or leaves.

The problem with downsizing your workforce by 10 times (or 5 times, or even 2 times sometimes) is that you're increasing your point of failures. If you have 100 developers, and 2 get sick, you still have 98 people working. That's 98% of your workforce. If you downsize those 100 developers to 10 developers, and 2 get sick, you're down to just 8 people working, or 80% of the workforce.

Now, imagine three are on vacation because you'll still have seven developers and that's enough—but then two get sick, and now you're down to just 50% of your workforce showing up. From a business standpoint, this is the ultimate nightmare to be in. The problem is, a lot of companies only see the bottom line and not the potential side effects of decisions like this—at least, not until it's too late.

It's always better to have a distributed developer system than rely one a single point of failure

More people does not equal more problems…it equals less problems

It's often played out as a meme, but it's so true. You have a small business with a handful of developers, and one person carries more weight then everyone else on the team. That one developer does the work of 10 people, but gets paid as just one person. The developer realizes that they're worth more than they make, and ask for a raise, only to get fired because someone else with AI "can do the same job for less."

The developer takes a severance package and goes to relax, knowing the entire system will crumble. Now, a few weeks later, the company is begging the developer to come back and offering a massive raise that's way higher than was ever asked for just to get the systems back online.

This is the problem with the 10x developer idea. One person replacing a bunch of others because it's "more efficient." It's only more efficient if nothing fails. It's better to have a distributed system than a single point of failure.

Why companies don't understand this is beyond me. Many companies have distributed services within their own technology stacks. High availability clusters, multiple storage servers and locations, and even multiple internet or power providers to keep things running in case something goes down. When it comes to employees, however, it seems like they're an afterthought—when they should be the primary thought.

One last (major) problem comes from the cloud going down. If you only have 2 developers on your team instead of 20, and those 2 rely exclusively on AI, what happens when the cloud goes down? If those two developers can't reach Claude Code or Codex, then they can't do their job. A team of 20 developers that all actually know how to write code? They can still fix issues when AWS goes down.

---

AI is fantastic, in fact, AI is great and revolutionary in many ways. I've used AI to develop applications and platforms in just a few months that would have taken traditional development teams multiple people and several months to develop normally. The problem is, if I go away, or if the cloud goes down, those apps stop working entirely.

The modern age is becoming too reliant on AI for its own good. It's a great tool, and it has definitely delivered the ability to be more productive then one person, but it also comes with a lot of caveats and drawbacks that I think far too few people realize.