We talk about “AI-assisted development” as though everyone is doing the same thing. But no two engineering teams are exactly alike. The culture is different. The processes are different. The constraints are different. And so is AI agent autonomy: how much decision-making power each engineer is actually comfortable handing over.
Using AI on a small team where two engineers own nearly everything is very different from using AI when a seemingly simple change touches backend services, mobile applications, downstream products, QA teams, third-party vendors, security processes, and then other people’s code.
In this episode of the Scaling Tech Podcast, special guest host and AgilityFeat & WebRTC.ventures COO Mariana Lopez, brings together three senior software engineers from her team working in very different environments for a comparison of what AI-assisted development actually looks like for them. Not theoretically, and not what the demos promise, but what they’re actually comfortable letting AI do.
- Tahir Gölge works on a 13-14 person team building a complex product across backend, mobile, QA, and third-party vendors, now preparing for production after years as a research project.
- Andrea Phillips works on a small team inside a large, healthcare-regulated organization with established frameworks and architecture already in place.
- Justin Williams works on a small team with significant ownership and autonomy, on a codebase he’s known since before AI tooling existed.
The panel compares how much work each engineer is willing to hand to an AI agent, and why that answer changes so much depending on team size, regulatory constraints, and how much context lives in documentation versus in people’s heads. They discuss their use of AI code-review tools to catch issues before a human ever looks at the PR, and debate whether more agents working in parallel actually produces better outcomes or just burns tokens faster.
If your team is figuring out how much autonomous AI coding to allow and what AI guardrails actually matter at your scale, this Scaling Tech Podcast episode is essential listening.
This episode is brought to you by AgilityFeat, providers of technical staffing, software development and AI integration services from Latin America. Learn more at agilityfeat.com.