AI as leverage: how a small team builds big products

Building a multi-city, multilingual product used to require a large team. Today, not necessarily.

We treat AI as leverage: one person, with the help of large models, agents and automation, can do what once took a whole group. Copywriting, translation, organizing data, drafting, running evals — the steps that used to eat enormous amounts of time get compressed, freeing human energy for the places that actually need judgment.

But leverage only helps if the direction is right. AI makes good decisions arrive faster, and bad ones scale faster too. So we still put thinking it through first ahead of everything: define the problem, then let AI accelerate.

This is how we build Machi and Shangence — a very small team, seriously serving a great many people.