AI's productivity gains mean that on a lean, early-stage team, there is little room for purely specialized roles. According to founder Drew Wilson, every team member, including designers, must be able to contribute directly to the codebase. The traditional "design artifact" workflow is too slow.

Dylan Field predicts that AI tools will blur the lines between design, engineering, and product management. Instead of siloed functions, teams will consist of 'product builders' who can contribute across domains but maintain a deep craft in one area. Design becomes even more critical in this new world.

The traditional tech team structure of separate product, engineering, and design roles is becoming obsolete. AI startups favor small teams of 'polymaths'—T-shaped builders who can contribute across disciplines. This shift values broad, hands-on capability over deep specialization for most early-stage roles.

Lovable prioritizes hiring individuals with extreme passion, high agency, and autonomy—people for whom the work is a core part of their identity. This focus on intrinsic motivation, verified through paid work trials, allows them to build a team that can thrive in chaos and drive initiatives from start to finish without supervision.

Lovable employs a full-time "vibe coder," a non-engineer who is an expert at using AI tools to build functional product prototypes, templates, and internal applications. This new role collapses the idea-to-feedback loop, allowing teams to prototype and ship at unprecedented speeds without relying on engineering resources for initial builds.

Ramp's hiring philosophy prioritizes a candidate's trajectory and learning velocity ("slope") over their current experience level ("intercept"). They find young, driven individuals with high potential and give them significant responsibility. This approach cultivates a highly talented and loyal team that outperforms what they could afford to hire on the open market.

LinkedIn is piloting a "Full Stack Builder" model where individuals handle the entire product lifecycle. The model's goal is to automate most tasks, allowing builders to focus on uniquely human traits: vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and especially judgment.

Bolt's philosophy of hiring entrepreneurial 'smart generalists' was key to its resilience and ability to pivot. When the company needed to shift focus from ride-hailing to food delivery overnight during COVID, its adaptable talent pool was a critical asset. An organization of specialists would have been unable to make such a drastic change so quickly.

Powerful AI assistants are shifting hiring calculus. Rather than building large, specialized departments, some leaders are considering hiring small teams of experienced, curious generalists. These individuals can leverage AI to solve problems across functions like sales, HR, and operations, creating a leaner, more agile organization.