AI adoption across a team
Adopting AI tooling across a team is an organisational question, not a technical one. The most common failure looks like this: the tool is purchased, everyone gets a licence, a few enthusiasts use it, the rest drop off, and six months later the verdict is "it didn't work for us".
The reason is usually this: the tool was provided, the workflow wasn't. An individual developer won't spend the time to build the setup themselves; if the repo isn't ready, the first experience is negative and there is no second attempt.
| Stage | What happens | Success criterion |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Pilot | 2-3 people, one project, 2-4 weeks | A concrete list of which tasks it helps with |
| 2. Repo preparation | CLAUDE.md, permissions, first skills | A newcomer can start with zero setup |
| 3. Rollout | Open to the team plus an onboarding doc | Active use rather than sporadic |
| 4. Standardisation | Review rules, security, CI | Quality metrics haven't degraded |
| 5. Measure and improve | Periodic review of what works and what doesn't | Skills and rules stay alive |
The most common mistake is measuring with productivity metrics: lines of code, commits, PR counts. Those are trivially inflated with an agent and mean nothing. More useful indicators: time to PR, bugs found in review, production incidents, flaky test count. Those reveal it when quality degrades.
A minimum set of team rules:
1. Don't merge code you don't understand. The most important one, because it prevents the worst form of technical debt.
2. A PR size limit. Large PRs don't get reviewed, and PR size grows easily with an agent.
3. What is not delegated — an explicit list: security, cryptography, payment logic, release configuration.
4. How secrets are handled — what is never pasted, plus the deny rules.
5. Skills live in the repo and get reviewed.
Most of these are simply good engineering rules — the agent makes them matter more, because writing code got cheap while understanding and verifying it did not.
📚 Sources and documentation
- Claude Code best practicesofficialcode.claude.com
- Managed settingsofficialcode.claude.com
Enforcing team rules technically.