Boris Cherny's five-rung AI adoption ladder.

Published July 16 by the Claude Code creator: 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). Anthropic self-reports operating at Step 3. The framing worth stealing is that the gap between one 10x engineer and the rest of an org is a bottleneck-and-guardrail problem specific to each rung, not a capacity problem. You don't fix Step 2 by hiring. You fix it by removing whatever makes running ten agents feel unsafe.