Opinion: AI-native engineering teams are replacing traditional delivery
Nearform CEO Ciaran Cosgrave looks at the advantages of AI-native teams over traditional pyramid-shaped structures in software engineering. Read more: Opinion: AI-native engineering teams are replacing traditional delivery
Nearform CEO Ciaran Cosgrave muses on the advantages of AI-native engineering teams in comparison to traditional structures. Anthropic's development of Claude Code, a billion-dollar product, took just two engineers and six months. This was achieved through the use of AI agents that accelerated iteration, enabling a rate of 60 to 100 internal releases per day, with each engineer pushing beyond industry standards.
Now, nearly all of Anthropic's code is written using Claude Code itself. This represents a shift from traditional team models, which were based on the notion that more people equals more output. Instead, AI-native teams are smaller, composed of three to five experienced engineers augmented by AI systems. The nature of the work has changed, with AI handling the execution and humans focusing on decision-making, defining system constraints, and verifying correct implementation.
By 2026, 75% of developers will orchestrate rather than code, as the scarcity shifts from coding to judgement and budget for AI tokens.
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