# How Intercom 2x’d their engineering velocity in 9 months with Claude Code | Brian Scanlan

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-ai-7304222/how-intercom-2x-d-their-engineering-velocity-in-9-months-with-claude-code-brian-scanlan
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-ai-7304222/how-intercom-2x-d-their-engineering-velocity-in-9-months-with-claude-code-brian-scanlan.md
Podcast: [How I AI](https://stenobird.com/podcast/how-i-ai-7304222)
Published: 2026-04-20T15:18:10+00:00
Episode link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/pen-name/episodes/How-Intercom-2xd-their-engineering-velocity-in-9-months-with-Claude-Code--Brian-Scanlan-e3hu3el
Audio file: https://anchor.fm/s/1035b1568/podcast/play/118475669/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-3-16%2F422172166-44100-2-7be130454e78f.mp3
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Duration seconds: 4725

## Resource

Brian Scanlan is a senior principal engineer at Intercom, where he’s led the company’s transformation to AI-first engineering. In just nine months, Intercom doubled their R&D throughput while maintaining code quality, with 100% of engineers—plus designers, PMs, and TPMs—now shipping code via Claude Code. What you’ll learn: How Intercom doubled their merged PRs per R&D employee in just nine months using Claude Code The telemetry infrastructure they built to measure AI adoption and quality across hundreds of engineers Why they built a skills repository with hooks that enforce engineering standards automatically How they’re preparing their product for an agent-first world with CLIs, MCPs, and ephemeral APIs The permission and accountability framework that enabled rapid AI adoption Why backlog zero is now achievable and what that means for engineering culture — Brought to you by: Celigo —Intelligent automation built for AI Cursor —The best way to code with AI — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Brian Scanlan (02:40) Why Intercom went all-in on AI for both product and engineering (05:01) The breakthrough moment with Opus 4.6 and Christmas break 2025 (07:02) Demo: Intercom’s merged PRs per R&D head (12:50) Agent-first work as a fundamental reimagining of technical workflows (14:27) The cost tradeoff: treating AI spend as an investment (16:47) Measuring quality (21:22) Demo: Shipping a redirect in the Rails monolith with Claude Code (24:03) Creating a custom PR skill (26:33) Building a software factory with predictable quality standards (30:15) Telemetry infrastructure: Honeycomb for skill usage tracking (32:10) Session data collection and personalized usage insights (36:08) Quick overview (39:20) Walking through Intercom’s skills repository (42:1…

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