How Building with AI Can Double the Throughput of Your Engineering Team — Brian Scanlan, Intercom

Intercom hit 2x engineering throughput in under a year. Not by prompting better. By treating Claude Code like a new hire: onboarding it to a Rails monolith built over 15 years, writing skills for every recurring task, connecting it to production systems and internal tooling, and going all in on one platform instead of letting everyone pick their favorite tool. Brian Scanlan covers what the data looks like: PR throughput doubled, 17.6% of pull requests auto-approved with SOC 2 sign-off, and the CI infrastructure collapsed under the volume. The principle behind all of it comes down to framing. Give agents problems, not tasks. He was pulled into a security incident over accidentally published Snowflake metadata, described the situation to Claude, and watched it pull the files, run the analysis, and hand back next steps in two minutes using a skill he didn't know existed. Speaker info: - https://x.com/brian_scanlan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/