Claude Code · Anthropic · AI Agent · Claude · Fortune Technology
Anthropic engineering head says Claude Code made employees’ work a ‘lonely experience’—and it could hint at Big Tech’s bigger
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As the tech industry continues to scale AI use, some companies are hitting snags not in the technology itself, but in the human workforce developing and working alongside AI agents.
Key facts
- There have been about 120,000 tech layoffs in 2026 so far, nearly equaling 2025’s total
- A Gallup report published this month found that among U.S. tech workers who use AI at least monthly, the likelihood of being laid off is about 6%, a rate that triples to 18% among workers who use
- The whole mood has changed,” Sunguk Moon, cofounder and CEO of Blind, told the New York Times last month
- That is a stressful time, right?” Neil Thompson, an assistant professor of innovation and strategy at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told Fortune
Summary
Fiona Fung, the engineering leader of Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork teams, said in a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast that agentic AI use in the workplace has increased so much it was making employees’ work more solitary, pushing the company to intervene with other team-building activities. “The other thing that we found interesting on the Claude Code team is, after a while, we felt it could start being a lonely experience because we all started working with our agents so much,” she said. Anthropic began implementing hackathons “to make sure we’re interacting together as a team,” as well as pair programming lunches for employees to share how they’re using Claude Code, Fung said. “When we do pairwise programming, we learn so much from each other,” she said.