"The era when small teams can win... We have no burden, we can completely revolutionize productivity in all our links as much as possible."
Extended reading: How conventions help small teams maintain stability, see Conventions and Development Standards—Let AI Dance in Chains. For the complete knowledge workflow pipeline that small teams can implement, see Meeting Recording→PRD→TDD→Code—AI-Native Team's Knowledge Workflow.
1. Large Companies vs. Small Teams: Who's More AI-Native
On the surface, large companies have more money, more people, more infrastructure,
seemingly better positioned to do AI transformation.
But in reality, AI-Native actually favors small teams:
- Large companies have massive historical systems and processes, hard to fully refactor
- Many processes, standards, and acceptance chains are designed around "humans writing code"
- Even if AI is introduced, it often can only do "small upgrades" in a few links
"In a large company, out of 100 links, it can innovate in at most 10 links.
We small teams are different. We have no burden, we can completely revolutionize productivity in all our links as much as possible."
2. AI-izing 100 Links: Multiplication Effect Far Exceeds Addition
Roughly breaking down a complete software engineering process, you can easily list dozens to hundreds of links:
- Requirement interviews, PRD, solution review
- Architecture design, technology selection, DB design
- Development, integration, testing, deployment
- Log analysis, alerts, fault troubleshooting, retrospective documentation
- ...and so on
In traditional transformation thinking:
- Large companies might pick 5–10 links to do AI acceleration
- Each link improves efficiency a bit, overall effect is "addition"
Small teams can do something large companies find very hard:
- From the start, assume: 100 links can all be AI-ized
- Don't presuppose "this link must be done by humans, that link can't be given to AI"
- Use a unified AI-Native design approach to string all links together
When 100 links have all been redesigned,
the overall improvement is no longer addition, but more like "multiple rounds of compound multiplication effects."
3. Fewer People = Need AI More, But Also More Opportunity to Use AI to the Fullest
A direct consequence of AI is: each person's productivity increases, but team size actually decreases.This is actually good for small teams: