Building the most AI-pilled engineering team in the world | Fiona Fung (Anthropic)
In a Nutshell
Fiona Fung describes how Anthropic's engineering teams now ship 8x more code because AI has removed coding as the bottleneck, shifting focus to ambition, verification, and quality. The most effective engineers demonstrate high agency paired with high accountability, while non-engineers like PMs and designers now write production code directly. Teams combat isolation and skill gaps through deliberate rituals like pairwise programming lunches, automated feedback routines, and maintaining "trust but verify" practices even as agents handle most implementation work.
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Anthropic engineers on average ship eight times as much code per quarter as they did compared to 2021 to 2025. Coding is no longer the bottleneck. It has lifted the ceiling of what anyone is able to do. Everything is now possible in theory. Now it is about how ambitious you can be. The people that seem to be doing best are taking the most initiative, getting the most proactive, and have the most agency. High agency comes with high accountability. The focus is on ensuring folks have the freedom to code while also maintaining accountability for outcomes and the hypothesis of what they are trying to solve.
Working extensively with AI agents can start being a lonely experience. On the Claude Code team, pairwise programming lunch was recently started. A gap is forming between people that are leaning into AI and excelling versus people that are not, who are super frustrated, fighting, and resisting. In terms of frustration, there is sometimes a little bit of fear. The advice for fear is to lean in and ask, "What can I do about it? What is within my control?"
Fiona Fung leads the teams behind Claude Code and Co-work at Anthropic. She oversees Boris Cherney and Kat Wu. Before Anthropic, at Microsoft she ran the teams that built TypeScript and Visual Studio. At Facebook she started the Facebook Marketplace team, which she took from idea to launch. Facebook Marketplace now generates over 100 billion dollars in GMV every year. While at Meta she oversaw work on Meta's first smart glasses product and helped build Orion, their first AR glasses product. At Instagram she led infrastructure, growth, integrity, and safety teams and oversaw an org of over 500 people. Fiona has been an engineer for over 25 years.
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