Engineering Getting Cheap?

Why is everyone a technical staff

I watched Code with Claude, Anthropic’s first developer conference recently, and every talk kept circling the same question. What does it actually mean to be a AI native builder in 2026.

What stuck with me was that everyone on stage had stopped behaving like the role on their badge. Designers were shipping their own UI fixes in code. PMs were building their own dashboards and running their own experiments. Engineers were shipping product copy and doing DS work to figure out opportunity sizing. Nobody was waiting on anybody for the next handoff. The team makeup that I have been used to for the past 11 years, the one I assumed was the natural shape of software development, didn’t look like the natural shape anymore.

Basically everyone is “Technical Staff” but why is the world going towards this direction in the world of AI?

I did the math to figure it out.

What Engineering Actually Costs

The traditional software team has the shape it does for one reason. Engineering is expensive.

If you draw the impact equation on a napkin, it looks roughly like this.