As the tech industry continues to scale AI use, some companies are hitting snags not in the technology itself, but in the human workforce developing and working alongside AI agents.
Fiona Fung, the engineering leader of Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork teams, said in a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast, agentic AI use in the workplace has increased so much it was making employees’ work more solitary, pushing the company to intervene with other team-building activities.
“The other thing that we found interesting on the Claude Code team is, after a while, we felt it could start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agents so much,” she said.
Anthropic began implementing hackathons “just to make sure we’re interacting together as a team,” as well as pair programming lunches for employees to share how they’re using Claude Code, Fung said. She deemed both interventions successful.
“When we do pairwise programming, we actually learn so much from each other,” she said. “Every time I watch someone work, I learn something myself as well.”
