How AI Agents Turned 5 Engineers Into 50

Most teams try to force AI into their existing workflow. Output goes up, but review, control, and ownership don’t keep up.

At Compostable AI, the problem was harder to ignore. They deploy single-tenant systems across fleets of AWS accounts, with strict isolation and no room for drift. The usual approach didn’t scale.

So they changed how software gets made. Agents generate, evaluate, and deploy code, including infrastructure, in a continuous loop, with humans setting the constraints.

That shift changes the economics of a team. Instead of adding people to handle growth, they focus on increasing what a small team can carry. Five engineers support a growing set of clients and systems without hitting the limits that used to force new hires.

In this conversation, CTO Ewan Dawson explains what changed, why infrastructure had to become typed code, and how they keep this system from breaking under real-world constraints.