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title: 1,000 agents per person? Beware of maturity models...
description: A field-level critique of Boris Cherny&#x27;s (Claude Code creator) &#x27;5 Steps of AI Adoption&#x27; maturity framework. The author argues that most engineering teams are...
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og:description: A field-level critique of Boris Cherny&#x27;s (Claude Code creator) &#x27;5 Steps of AI Adoption&#x27; maturity framework. The author argues that most engineering teams are...
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# 1,000 agents per person? Beware of maturity models written by the people selling the tokens

**[Medium](https://daily.dev/sources/medium_js)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A field-level critique of Boris Cherny's (Claude Code creator) '5 Steps of AI Adoption' maturity framework. The author argues that most engineering teams are still at Level 1 (one developer, one agent) and the real work is building the harness — CI pipelines, test suites, linters, automated reviews — to safely reach Level 2. The framework's Level 4 vision of 1,000+ agents per person is criticized as a vendor sales funnel that ignores organizational reality. Key points: context engineering matters from day one (not Level 3), DORA data shows AI adoption without system mastery increases instability, and the goal should be trust in agent output rather than maximizing token consumption. The author recommends Level 2, and Level 3 for some teams, as the realistic sweet spot today.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://medium.com/@magne.arthur/1-000-agents-per-person-beware-of-maturity-models-written-by-the-people-selling-the-tokens-432c2cf7ff11>

---

Tags: [#productivity](https://daily.dev/tags/productivity), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#cicd](https://daily.dev/tags/cicd), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/1-000-agents-per-person-beware-of-maturity-models-written-by-the-people-selling-the-tokens-dqtglkwxn)

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