The funny thing is a lot of that was never really necessary per se. Tons of stories about great projects coming out of tiny teams. They’re not likely geniuses, they just had focus and clarity and a drive to GSD without excessive unproductive activity. I’ve long been a proponent of offshore developers for cost savings. You have to manage the process and people differently, but the output per dollar (pre AI) was phenomenal and when managing them I could put my brand of low touch management in place. Usually consisting of one weekly 1 hour meeting for everyone, then emphasizing nobody spins their wheels ever for more than an hour during the week without asking for help, then just making sure everyone was crystal clear on what we were working on and the priorities. I’ve never been a fan of sprints or really any unit of time block as a milestone because I don’t think it incentivizes people to finish early. I’m also not a perfectionist. If it’s spaghetti code and it works, great, we can clean it up on the next pass (within reason of course, but spirit is build, test, operationalize, then if it’s useful and has some staying power then refactor later. For all this, hiring cheap labor overseas has always made much more sense than hiring locally (in US) based on cost but also based one working style/culture. Somehow as labor rates shot up here in last couple of decades, people found excuses not to offshore. Some of it valid if you can’t manage the project correctly as it is different, but for me the solution has been to adapt my management style versus crying about it being difficult and hiring locally to be lazy. It always struck me as odd that startups and investors hadn’t leveraged the labor rate arbitrage opportunity that exists.