Impulse: Even With AI, There Can Be No 10x Engineer Without a 10x Organization to Flourish In

Even with AI, there can be no 10x engineer without a 10x organization where they can flourish.

Generating code has become faster than ever in recent years. The quality of that code has steadily improved over the past months — provided that the person directing and supervising the AI agents knows what they’re doing.

People hear promises like “two to three times the speed by introducing AI agents” or “give your senior devs Claude Code and they’ll turn into 10x engineers”. The first one is very much possible; the second is probably so rare that it’s defensible to dismiss the term as marketing-speak.

People then assume they’ll get those results automatically once they hand their engineers a Claude Code or Codex license.

What I see almost daily instead is this:

The individual engineer’s output goes up, naturally. But that’s only a win when the engineer sits in a well-coordinated team that is itself part of a well-oiled machine — because only in those organizations is writing code the bottleneck that was always meant to be removed.

In every other organization, the higher engineer output reveals where things really get stuck. A few examples:

1. Requirements from “the business” change more often than gas prices, so the increased output simply has to be reworked more often.
2. Code review is synonymous with a “thumbs up” and “LGTM” (Looks Good To Me), so “more code” simply turns into “more bugs” for the user.
3. Nobody really knows what users are missing or what the top priority should be right now, so even more useless “stuff” gets built that, in the end, only 2% of users use exactly once.

You might be wondering now: “How do I figure out whether AI agents can actually help me?”

Well, by trying it out. Precisely because AI agents expose the weak spots, they are also the best diagnostic tool you have right now.

So you introduce AI agents as soon as possible, but with a clear, simple strategy and the willingness to experiment and iterate. Every problem that comes up along the way then has to be solved; regardless of whether the problem is an API outage at Anthropic or a dreadful review culture.

Both can be solved. I’ve already shown several teams exactly how: Explore the AI Agent Engineering Workshop.