Anthropic engineering head says Claude Code made employees’ work a ‘lonely experience’—and it could hint at Big Tech’s bigger morale problem

As the tech industry continues to scale AI use, some companies are hitting snags not in the technology itself, but in the human workforce developing and working alongside AI agents. Fiona Fung, the engineering leader of Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork teams, said in a recent episode of Lenny’s Podcast, agentic AI use in the workplace has increased so much it was making employees’ work more solitary, pushing the company to intervene with other team-building activities. “The other thing that we found interesting on the Claude Code team is, after a while, we felt it could start being a lonely experience because we all started just working with our agents so much,” she said. Anthropic began implementing hackathons “just to make sure we’re interacting together as a team,” as well as pair programming lunches for employees to share how they’re using Claude Code, Fung said. She deemed both interventions successful. “When we do pairwise programming, we actually learn so much from each other,” she said. “Every time I watch someone work, I learn something myself as well.” An Anthropic spokesperson said the company is paying close attention to how its AI tools impact how employees work together. “We’re seeing engineers find new ways to learn from and build alongside one another, in what’s really an evolution of pair programming,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. “Where pairing was once about working through a tough problem together, it’s now increasingly about seeing how a colleague uses these new tools and systems differently than you might, so even as more of the work shifts toward collaborating with agents, engineers keep learning from one another. Sharing how our own work is changing, including the hard parts, helps us build tools that best serve the people using them.” While Anthropic leaders like Fung said the company has adapted to challenges tech employees have faced as they increase AI use,