Companies using tools like Anthropic's Claude Code are letting small teams ship products that once required far larger workforces.
When Eric Lauer needs to hire at Giftory, the online gift-giving platform he runs, he's no longer looking for eager young coders fresh out of college.
He wants "mid-career people who are lazy in a smart way"—experienced developers he calls architects who know how to wield AI coding tools to multiply their output rather than write every line from scratch.
"To be an architect, you need that previous world experience, and you need to know all the workflows," Lauer told AFP. Candidates with "no knowledge whatsoever of the workflows" are "a lot less appealing for an organization like ours."
It is a calculus playing out across the tech industry as a new generation of AI-powered coding assistants transforms how software gets built.
