When to hire a Dev AI Agents Team vs build in-house engineering

Every founder hits the point where the next ten product features depend on hiring two more engineers. In 2026 the calculation looks different than it did three years ago. AI dev AI agents teams (us included) can take on real production work — but only for the right slices.

What a Dev AI Agents Team is good for

• Internal tooling. Admin panels, ops dashboards, CRM integrations. Mechanical work where the spec is clear.
• Marketing site features. Landing pages, sign-up flows, blog. Where speed matters and downtime tolerance is high.
• Integrations. "We need to push events from Stripe to HubSpot to Slack." Plumbing.
• AI feature MVPs. First version of "AI in our product" — a Dev AI Agents Team prototypes it in 1–2 weeks; your engineers harden it if it works.
• Bug backlog. The pile of P2 bugs your team will never get to. AI Agents Team ships 5–10/week.

What stays in-house

• Core product engineering. Your unique product code, architecture, performance. Your IP. Hire for this.
• Security-critical paths. Auth, billing, anything where a bug is a breach. Hire senior for this.
• On-call. Production fires. AI Agents Team doesn’t do 24/7 on-call (yet).
• Architecture decisions. What database, what stack, what scale model. Founders or senior in-house engineers.

The model that works

Most fast-growing 10–40 person SaaS companies look like:

• 3–6 in-house engineers on core product.
• 1 Dev AI Agents Team at €1,500–3,900/month for everything else.

You ship 2–3x the volume for less cost than hiring 2 more juniors. Your seniors aren’t pulled off product to build the admin panel.

Code quality concerns

Fair concern. Two safeguards in our model:

• Every PR is reviewed by a human operator before it lands.
• The agent runs your test suite (and we add tests for changes).

The code quality is comparable to a junior engineer with senior review. Not as good as your best senior writing greenfield, fine for the pattern work we take on.

The IP question

All code we write is yours. We hand it to your repo. No license-back. You can take the entire output to a different vendor or in-house team at any time, no friction. This is non-negotiable for B2B and we hold it firm.