When writing code is no longer the bottleneck, every process built around old cost assumptions must be rewritten.
Leads engineering and product for Claude Code and Cowork, working closely with Boris Cherny (Claude Code lead) and Cat Wu (product lead). Since joining, she has been writing production code using Claude Code — "the first time in a long time I've personally shipped production-grade software."
She compares AI's impact on software engineering to the 2000s shift from CD-ROM physical distribution to internet delivery: it's not just a new tool — the cost structure has changed. When the cost structure changes, every process must be rewritten.
She lived through the VS 2005 era of "racing to hit the disc-stamping deadline." That era's waterfall, design docs, and 10:1 manager ratios were all built around the premise that "engineering capacity is expensive."
Processes rarely kill themselves. We tend to just layer more and more processes on.Fiona Fung”
6-month roadmaps, design doc before every line of code, extensive product reviews.
When she first joined, she built a 6-month roadmap. Three months later it was already obsolete.
When she first joined and wanted to do an API refactor, she and Boris had a technical disagreement. Her instinct was to pull Boris into a meeting room and draw on whiteboards — then she stopped herself. She had Claude generate 3 competing PRs. The key benefit wasn't just seeing different implementations, but seeing each approach's impact on all API callers.
Cultural safeguard: Cheap code actually demands better team alignment culture. "What totally won't fly is the last person who checks in wins. I'm going to stay up at 3 a.m. to submit this PR."
She asked Claude to turn the terminal mascot into a snowman. A designer looked at it and said: "You turned Claude into the Mr. Peanut character." Aesthetic judgment still requires humans.
All PRs are Claude-assisted, so "who wrote it" becomes blurry. What's more useful is double-clicking to ask:
She used to manually open the feedback channel every morning for Claude to summarize. Now it's automated with Routines — when she made this slide deck (about a month ago), Routines didn't even exist. That's the pace of change.
No longer heavily indexing on: raw throughput
The recruiting team planned with 10:1 ratios and nested hierarchies. Fung rejected that, requiring every manager to start as an IC upon joining. Recruiters said: "No manager would be interested in that." Her response: "Well, this is what dogfooding on the Claude Code team's about. If someone's not interested, it's better for us to do earlier separation."
At Meta she still tried to do one PR per year, but internal tools kept changing — now with Claude you don't need to remember git commands.
Org principles: As flat as possible, entire team shares one mission, pods have high autonomy.
When answering customer questions, she queries the codebase directly using local Claude Code. If a team has a good spec, she recommends checking it into the repo so Claude can validate against it — rather than treating spec and code as two separate sources of truth.
When building is cheap, arguing is expensive.Fiona Fung”
Not just engineers — PMs, designers, all cross-functional partners. Also heavy use of Cowork.
Any manual step is an automation candidate. For every task, ask "can Claude help me do this?"
Old processes don't kill themselves. Teams must be explicitly empowered to eliminate them.
A large room where everyone sat staring at laptops, only looking up when it was their turn to report. Fung asked one question — "Why are we having it?" — everyone nodded, and the meeting was cancelled.
From stand-up meetings → shared spreadsheet → stand-up Skill (a markdown file that tells Claude its role). Runs automatically; everyone stays informed at all times.
"Pick your noisiest workflow."
The most expensive one, the one you dread most, the one your team looks forward to least — ask whether it still serves its original purpose. If it can be automated, Claudify it. If it's no longer needed, kill it outright.
Weekly PR merges doubled within three months. Docs team is one person, using agentic routines for overnight auto-updates.
Autonomous Claude Code agent Robobun now commits more to the Bun codebase than Jarred himself.
Software engineering is shifting from "write code + review" to "define tasks → dispatch agents → review results."
Opus 4.7 in auto mode can run autonomously for hours. Six months ago this would have sounded like science fiction.
Data source: Chris Ebert (software engineer) conference notes