ClaimArticle

Traditional engineering practices like two-pizza teams, PRDs for complex projects, and the challenge of context switching remain unchanged despite AI.

Despite rapid AI-driven changes, several fundamentals persist at Anthropic: two-pizza sized teams, the importance of planning and PRDs for complex projects, and context switching remain challenges—though design has become more ongoing and less upfront, and teams work on more projects simultaneously. ✦ AI generated

Author (narrator) · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-07-28 · original ↗

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Still the same: two-pizza teams, planning is important, PRDs are relevant in complex projects, context switching is a challenge, the ratio of time spent on coding vs testing not changing that much. Just like before, we had a PRD, it was a Google Doc. We used a Google Doc because we needed to coordinate all interested people. This has not gone away.

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▦ Anthropic

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Evidence · 1

The most complex project (Claude Managed Agents) took six months and required a pre-AI-style planning process with PRDs, not rapid prototyping.Katelyn Lesse · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 90%

Counterpoint · 1

A year-long, multi-engineer rewrite of Bun from Zig to Rust was completed in 11 days using 64 parallel AI agents and $165K in tokens.Jarred Sumner · The Pragmatic Engineer · conf 80%

This moment responds to

supports → The problems teams are hitting with AI-generated code — tech debt, review bottlenecks, architecture drift — aren't new problems at all, and neither are the solutions; teams are just hitting them on fast-forward instead of over years.Scott Tolinski · Syntax rebuts → The 'SaaS apocalypse' narrative wrongly extrapolates the behavior of five-person technical startups building internal tools onto Fortune 100 enterprises.Sarah · No Priors