Here's a law of software engineering that every leader knows but few act on: communication overhead grows exponentially with team size.
Team of 3: 3 communication paths
Team of 5: 10 communication paths
Team of 8: 28 communication paths
Team of 12: 66 communication paths
Formula: n(n-1)/2
The 12-person team has 22x the communication overhead
of the 3-person team. And ships maybe 2x the code.
You already knew this. But before AI, you couldn't do much about it. You needed a frontend developer, a backend developer, a QA engineer, a DevOps person, a designer, a product manager, a tech lead, and a scrum master to ship a feature. Eight roles minimum. Reducing the team meant reducing capability.
AI changed that equation.