Nearform CEO Ciaran Cosgrave. Image: Nearform
Nearform CEO Ciaran Cosgrave looks at the advantages of AI-native teams over traditional pyramid-shaped structures in software engineering.
Two engineers. Six months. A billion-dollar product. That’s what it took Anthropic to build Claude Code from concept to company-wide infrastructure. Not a prototype, or a niche internal tool, but something that, by early 2026, had become mission-critical across the entire organisation.
Claude Code was developed using AI agents to accelerate iteration, enabling a pace of 60 to 100 internal releases per day, with each engineer pushing far beyond typical industry output. By January 2026, nearly all of Anthropic’s code was being written with Claude Code itself. Now this isn’t just about faster development, as Claude Code has become a fundamental model that has been engineered to allow small teams to compress what used to take years into just months.
Welcome to the AI-native engineering team. It looks nothing like what most organisations are building.
