SAN FRANCISCO — Anthropic implemented hackathons and pair programming lunches to address employee isolation. Fiona Fung, an engineering leader on Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork teams, stated in a recent episode of Lenny's Podcast that agentic AI use in the workplace has increased. "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," Fung said.

Anthropic implemented hackathons to ensure employees interact together as a team. The company also introduced pair programming lunches for employees to share how they are using Claude Code. Fung described the hackathons and pair programming lunches as successful interventions.

Fung noted benefits from the programming lunches. "When we do pairwise programming, we actually learn so much from each other," she said. She added, "Every time I watch someone work, I learn something myself as well."

An Anthropic spokesperson stated the company is monitoring how its AI tools impact employee collaboration. The spokesperson said, "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 added, "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." The spokesperson further stated, "Sharing how our own work is changing, including the hard parts, helps us build tools that best serve the people using them."