Diagnose AI adoption by rung, not by headcount — Cherny's 5-step ladder

Boris Chernyvia @bcherny·high signal

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny published 'Steps of AI Adoption' on July 16, mapping five maturity levels: Gated (0 agents, legacy approvals) → Assisted (~1, pair programming) → Parallel (~10, orchestrator role) → Supervised autonomy (~100, manager-of-managers) → AI-native (1,000+, intent steering). The framing that matters: the gap between one 10x engineer and the rest of the org is a bottleneck-and-guardrail problem specific to each rung, not a capacity problem. Anthropic self-reports operating at Step 3.