February 6, 2026
One pizza to rule them all
The rise of one-pizza engineering teams
From two pizzas to one: solo devs flex while teams ask who’s the bottleneck
TLDR: AI makes coding fast, pushing the slowdown to product and design and elevating hybrid “product engineers” and specialists. Commenters split between solo‑dev swagger, veterans saying small teams always worked, jokes about personal pizza, and warnings that limited human attention—not code—will cap speed and quality.
AI coding tools are turning Amazon’s “two-pizza team” into a one-slice show, and the comments are absolutely feasting on it. The article says coding isn’t the slow part anymore—product managers and designers are—and introduces “product engineers” (hybrid builders who also help shape what gets built) as the new stars. The crowd? Loud, divided, and hilarious.
One user flexed the ultimate lean team: “me only :)” — a perfect tagline for the AI era’s lone wolf coder. Another cracked that “any pizza is a personal pizza,” because of course the internet measured team size by stomach size. But the real heat comes from debates over team size and roles. A pragmatic voice says 2–3 people has “pretty much always been true” for new projects, AI or not — suggesting the hype is just a new wrapper on an old truth. Meanwhile, a spicy take calls full‑stack jobs “free options contracts” for companies, cheering a shift back to specialized front-end and back-end experts who can keep AI’s “acceptable but not excellent” code from wrecking the codebase.
Then the philosophical mic drop: if machines make code fast and cheap, human attention becomes the choke point. Translation: the limit isn’t typing—it’s deciding. The vibe? Equal parts bravado, realism, and meme-fueled hunger. Two pizzas are out; the internet’s arguing over whether the future is one pizza, one dev, or one big bottleneck — people
Key Points
- •AI coding tools reduce time spent on coding, shifting bottlenecks to product management and design.
- •LLMs currently provide limited leverage for PM and design tasks, making delivery of specs and wireframes a new constraint.
- •Some companies are adopting product engineers who take on parts of PM and design responsibilities while PMs/designers retain core roles.
- •AI‑generated code can degrade quality without expert oversight, necessitating specialists as review gatekeepers.
- •The article predicts fewer full‑stack roles and more specialized back‑end and front‑end positions, and suggests rethinking the two‑pizza team model.