Affirm Runs AI Development Sprint with 800 Engineers
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Affirm paused normal engineering delivery for a week in February 2026 and tasked over 800 engineers to complete a full agentic AI workflow from ideation to PR submission.
- Affirm had over 80% of its engineering team as weekly active users of an AI‑assisted developer tool by December 2025.
- Affirm selected Claude Code as the default agentic coding tool for the retooling effort, building a single repeatable workflow around its primitives.
- Affirm’s new workflow consisted of six stages—Plan, Review, Execute, Verify, Review, Deliver—with human checkpoints at planning, code review, and merging.
- Affirm allocated a $200 k token‑usage budget (≈$250 per engineer) for the AI Retooling Week and spent roughly 70% of it.
- Affirm reported that by week’s end 92% of its engineers had submitted an agent‑assisted PR and that over 60% of all PRs were now agent‑assisted.
Why it matters: Affirm’s engineering organization gains faster, higher‑quality software delivery by shifting most coding tasks to AI agents, while the company curbs costly manual reviews and CI bottlenecks; the $200 k token budget shows the economic scale of AI‑driven development and demonstrates that large‑scale AI integration can be financially viable for fintech firms.
Ask SkimNews
