The 5 Steps of AI Adoption
Boris Cherny's ladder for how a team grows into working with AI — from every action gated behind a human, to a thousand agents running in loops overnight. Where are you on it?
Watch the animated explainer
The whole ladder in forty seconds — the five rungs, the gate where teams first stall on autonomy, and how leverage climbs from zero agents to a thousand.
Key takeaway: the gate is Supervised Autonomy — you only pass it once your verification is strong enough to trust the loop.
The five rungs
Each step hands more of the work to the agents — and multiplies what one engineer can ship.
Gated
AI is boxed in. Every action waits for explicit human approval before it runs. You review each suggestion by hand; nothing happens autonomously.
Assisted
AI works alongside you — autocomplete, chat, single-shot edits. One agent, but the human stays firmly in the driver's seat and makes every call.
Parallel
You run several agents at once on independent tasks. You stop typing the work and start orchestrating it — dispatching, merging, and steering.
Supervised Autonomy • THE GATE
Agents run end-to-end; you review outcomes, not steps. Most teams stall here on the first try — you only pass once your verification is strong enough to trust the loop. Fail it, and you drop back to build that trust. Pass it, and autonomy compounds.
AI-Native
AI-first by default. Humans set direction, write the loops, and handle escalations while agents do the work — hundreds to thousands of them, running in loops around the clock.
Agents per engineer
The same climb, as a single number. Each rung is roughly an order of magnitude.
“I don't prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops.” — Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code, Anthropic
Ready for the rung above? The companion course goes deep on the practice that makes autonomy safe: Loop Engineering →
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