[com2kid]

> In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years.

The Microsoft Band golfing on device UI was built by 1 developer in 2 or 3 months.

The entire notification experience was 2 or 3 developers on and off again for the product's lifecycle.

The onscreen keyboard was a couple ML engineers and a software engineer for a few months.

The runtime it ran on was ~8 engineers, including all drivers, board bring ups, custom file system, everything.

Small teams can do amazing things, but they rely on good leadership and on every member on the team being able to pull their own weight. We had 1 person design+code the entire file system, and as you mention, that put the bus factor at 1.