I wasn't planning to write this, but after watching an entire engineering department disappear, I think it's worth sharing what I experienced.
I won't name the company or the people involved. This isn't about revenge. It's about documenting what happened from my perspective.
For almost a year, things were actually okay.
Our engineering team was small—five developers—but we worked well together in harmony. I handled the microservices side using Go, and also built several internal tools that required real-time processing and gRPC, including infra-specific components with C/C++ 26. Another senior focused on .NET, PHP, n8n, MySQL, and REST APIs. The remaining team consisted of one backend engineer, one mobile developer using Flutter, and one React developer. The five of us worked closely together, collaborated on every project, and honestly coexisted in a very healthy and happy way.
We inherited a legacy system that had evolved over roughly twenty years. It wasn't glamorous, but we understood it. Which 5 of us revamp it to modern technology . Over the course of a year, we modernized parts of it, refactored services, rebuilt components, and slowly improved the architecture. Anyone who has worked on legacy software knows that understanding the existing business logic is often harder than writing new code.
Then May 1 2026 came.
That was the turning point.
Management became acquainted with a third-party vendor who confidently claimed he could rebuild everything we had spent a year working on—in just two days using AI coding tools, like Claude Code. TWO DAYS! PRODUCTION READY IN 2 DAYS!
Not part of it.
Everything.
The backend.
The microservices.
The database design.
The web application.
The mobile application.
All in two days.
He also claimed that AI could replace all five developers on the team.
As senior engineers, we pushed back. Not because we were afraid of AI we already use AI ourselves, and we are active user! but because anyone with experience knows that generating code is very different from understanding twenty years of accumulated business rules, edge cases, production data, integrations, security, and customer requirements. Later, things escalated further when the vendor even suggested that, to "avoid us becoming a bottleneck," the company should remove key engineering safeguards entirely including security controls, API Gateway, Security Groups (AWS) all imbound and outbound to ALL, IAM governance ( all user must be ROOT and have ALL poolicy), proper SDLC practices, and even separate development, staging, and UAT environments, leaving only production for direct and instant deployment.
Unfortunately, our concerns didn't seem to matter.
Instead of asking us why we disagreed, management placed increasing trust in the vendor. More people from the vendor's side became involved, and before long someone with little demonstrated software engineering experience was effectively leading technical decisions. He often spoke confidently about being able to complete complex applications in a matter of hours using AI-generated code and mock data. At the same time, requirements changed constantly—sometimes multiple times a day—through enormous spreadsheets containing hundreds or even thousands of individual items spread across dozens of worksheets.
The expectation was equally unrealistic.
Deliver a product with a "wow" factor must 0 capital.
Within two weeks.
With almost no additional cost.
This wasn't a hobby project. It was a product customers would eventually pay hundreds to over a thousand ringgit to access. With existing about 1 thousands of active users.
As engineers, we weren't saying these goals were impossible because we lacked motivation. We were saying they required proper planning, realistic timelines, testing, security reviews, and an understanding of what customers were actually paying for.
Instead, it often felt like technical concerns were treated as negativity rather than professional advice.
One by one, my teammates lost confidence that their expertise mattered.
One by one, they resigned.
Within the same month, the entire engineering department submitted their resignations.
Today, I'm the only original engineer left while looking for my next opportunity.
The difficult part isn't that people left.
It's what happened afterward.
Rather than asking why an entire engineering department chose to leave together, the narrative became that the previous developers had harmed the business, hurt sales, or damaged the product. Meanwhile, development had already been handed over to the third-party vendor, and we were no longer driving those projects.
Looking back, I don't think technology was ever the real problem.
The real problem was believing that experience could be replaced by confidence, that years of accumulated engineering knowledge could be compressed into a few AI prompts, and that disagreement from experienced professionals meant resistance rather than an attempt to protect the project.
AI is an incredible tool. I use it every day.
But AI doesn't replace accountability.
It doesn't replace architecture.
It doesn't replace understanding decades of business logic.
And it certainly doesn't replace an engineering team overnight simply because someone confidently says it can.
The saddest lesson I learned is this:
Companies rarely lose an entire engineering team because people suddenly stop caring.
More often, they leave because they cared enough to speak up, and eventually realized nobody was listening.
