I work for a tiny startup, and at this exact moment in history, being a tiny startup is suddenly an enormous advantage.

For most of software history, small companies maneuvered fast, but large companies had way more firepower. If a client wanted something the smaller company's product didn't already do, they'd hit a brick wall, because ChungusCorp had 200 engineers and you had three.

Agentic coding completely flips the script on this.

three is the new thirty

Three excellent senior developers can now move as quickly as 30. They know the whole product, talk directly to each other, and can turn on a dime without asking fifteen people for permission. When they go home at night, their 10 agent sessions keep going through the night. This completely changes what a small company can sell.

A few years ago, you built a product and looked for customers who might need that product. Then you tried to convince them it was a perfect fit. If a huge opportunity needed something that was substantially different, tough shit.

Today, a tiny startup can walk into a client meeting and confidently say yes to every requirement, even the ones that would've been a fuck no in the past. Need an entirely new feature? yes. A bespoke version for your company? you got it. Need it by Friday? fuck it, why not. As long as you're willing to pay, we can build it.

I'm not talking about mockups or prototypes. They can build working software in that time, then keep changing it until they've fulfilled the customer's wildest dreams.

how the fuck do you compete with that?

The larger company still has the reputation to bring to bear, a killer sales team, maybe hundreds of engineers - but it also has to coordinate the work between a small village of employees, and navigate a god damn jungle of regulatory compliance, procedure, stakeholder meetings, and departmental handoffs.

The tiny startup has three people in a room saying "sure, we can build that, sounds like fun!" By the time the big-ass company has figured out which department even owns the requirement, the tiny startup has already finished building the pilot.

Are large tech teams going to shrink, or even disappear as tiny startups with three 10xers completely eat their lunch in the coming years?