All my recent thinking about the shapes of teams in the AI era has got me all up in my feelings about the shape of things over the 25 plus years I’ve been doing this.

These were some of my favourites;

The Webmaster era – just me, a copy of Notepad.exe, Filezilla and a ‘HTML for Dummies’ book.

The Webmaster+ era where it was still just little old me…but with the addition of M$ Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver.

CMS days – the Wild West. Wrangling distributed publishing, trying to set and maintain standards, making sense of the idiosyncrasies of the software…but again mainly just solo. Though in latter days I got a couple of wranglers to help out. Maybe three of us – all-in.

That fun WordPress & early social media period where I had a little team of generalists all with their own particular interests and we were (with hindsight) just throwing things at the wall to see what would stick. There were just enough people to really try things – in 2010 alone I think we launched a blog network, a wiki, a podcast, a new corporate website, live streamed a conference, built a Twitter ‘wall’ app…and more. It was still only four or five of us.

The last era I really loved was the loosely defined, whatever works to get the job done, agile team era (small, scrappy, over stretched but high performing) where we were making things up as we went along – learning from others on the fly and genuinely feeling all the benefits of team work. That true ‘two pizza’ team (well I was probably a ‘two pizza’ PM at the time – I was like 125kg!).

In recent years it has often felt a bit box ticky and bloated (to me anyway) and while I have all sorts of concerns and anxieties about AI in general I am finding myself interested to see if the disruption might make things a little leaner in the right way again. Though then I read something like this and honestly I just return to worrying because if that is the direction of ‘design’ in software development…well we are well and truly f**ked.