At Hyprnote, we hired five people total. Two cofounders, three employees and interns. We let them all go.
We started shipping faster after that.
The bottleneck was coordination, not headcount
Before we made the change, our workflow looked like most startups. Someone would find a bug. We'd discuss it in standup. Someone would take it. A few days later, it might get fixed.
Landing pages took weeks. Blog posts sat in drafts. UI polish never happened because nobody had time.
The issue wasn't skill. Every task required alignment. Who's doing what? Did you see my message? Can you review this? When can we ship?
Adding people made it worse. More people meant more meetings, more context-sharing, more waiting.
We rebuilt the workflow around AI
We kept Slack and email as the front door. When a bug comes in, it goes to Devin. Batch work like blog posts, landing pages, and UI polish gets routed through GitHub and MDX. AI agents work in parallel while we do other things.
For work that needs taste, we use Zed and GitButler. These are the tools where we get hands-on.
AI handles whatever we can describe in clear steps. Everything else — the work that requires context nobody has written down — stays with us.
Why we didn't fire people because of AI
We fired people because coordination cost was killing our speed, not because AI could do their jobs.
When you have a team, every decision involves communication. You explain what you want, why it matters, what the constraints are. Then you wait. Then you review. Then you explain what needs to change.
With an AI agent, the loop is tighter. You describe the task. The agent executes. You review. If it's wrong, you iterate right there. No waiting, no layers.
This doesn't work for everything. AI can't prioritize. It can't tell you what matters. But for the kind of work that was eating our days — implementation, first passes, cleanup — it cut the cycle from days to minutes.
What changed after we went lean
We ship more and spend less time in meetings. No standups, no syncs unless something requires a real conversation.
Work happens in channels. Devin picks up tasks from Slack. We review PRs in GitButler. If something needs a human touch, we jump in with Zed or Claude Code.
The workflow is async by default. Nobody's waiting on anyone else. If an agent gets stuck, it flags the issue and we step in. Otherwise, it keeps going.
What we actually learned
Adding people doesn't always add capacity. Sometimes it adds overhead.
Every person on a team increases the surface area for communication. More communication means more time spent not building. This is Brook's Law, but it hits harder at two people than at two hundred. At a small team, every hire doubles the coordination load.
AI doesn't eliminate the need for people. It eliminates the need for people to do things that don't require context or taste. A lot of what we were hiring for fell into that bucket.
