AI Means We Need Fewer Developers: What That Changes for Staffing
If AI lets your team do more with fewer people, that may well be true for you, and nobody can yet say how far it will go. What it does change is the staffing question: in a smaller team each person carries more, the size you will need in two years is hard to predict, and the profile shifts towards people who direct and check AI output. That argues for continuity and flexibility rather than a long-term hire based on today's assumptions. Through Tunga you can add or reduce people with 4 weeks' notice, and the professionals work with the same AI tools as developers anywhere.
Fewer people, each carrying more
Many teams already do with 2 or 3 developers what took 5 a few years ago. AI coding tools are part of normal work now: in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, 84% of developers used or planned to use AI tools, and 51% of professional developers used them daily.
The consequence is easy to miss. When a team gets smaller, each person in it holds more of the system and more of the knowledge. One departure, one long absence or one person who turns out not to fit weighs more than it did in a team of 5.
Nobody knows how big the team will be in two years
The honest answer to "how many developers will we need" has become "it depends on how the tools develop", and that changes from quarter to quarter. A team that hires for a fixed size today assumes it will still need that size in two years.
Through Tunga, the size of the team can follow the work: you add someone when you need them, and you end an engagement with 4 weeks' notice when you don't. Broekhuis, for example, scaled from 1 to 5 developers at its peak and back down once its application was finished.
The profile you need shifts
With AI writing more of the code, the work moves towards deciding what to build and checking what comes back. In the same Stack Overflow survey, 46% of developers said they don't trust the accuracy of AI output, up from 31% the year before. Reviewing, testing and understanding the domain become a bigger part of the job.
That shows up in what companies ask for: developers who direct AI tools and review their output, people who know the business domain, and people who can build AI tools and integrations for the rest of the organisation when the company's own staff can't be freed up for it.
AI skills are new for everyone
Working with coding agents is new for developers everywhere, in Amsterdam as much as in Lagos. Tunga's professionals use the same tools as their peers elsewhere. Some examples from their public profiles on tunga.io:
- Toluwani (Ibadan, Nigeria) ships client projects with Claude Code as his main development tool, directed through custom skills and project configurations, and reviews every line of AI-generated code himself.
- Ronnie (Kampala, Uganda) evaluated Gemini's coding output for Google DeepMind and built an autonomous coding agent that takes tasks from Slack and opens pull requests across more than 10 microservices.
- Henok (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) builds Python pipelines on Azure that use OpenAI for document parsing, with tests and CI/CD as the check on AI-generated code.
When fewer people means none
If AI removes the need for an extra person altogether, you don't need a staffing partner. And when there is no one in your team who decides what needs to be built and checks whether it is right, adding a developer, with or without AI, won't solve that.
Where Tunga fits
Tunga takes the staffing side off the plate of companies that need digital professionals: software engineers, AI operators, product managers and other digital roles, from across Africa. The client directs the work. Tunga handles finding and vetting, contracts, payments and compliance, onboarding, keeping people, and replacing them when someone leaves or it isn't working. The professionals are independent freelancers contracted by Tunga and work remotely from their own country; the client has one contract, with Tunga, and a delivery manager who checks in with both sides. In 2025, about 1 in 56 placements ended because the professional left for another job. Founded in 2015; 3,500 professionals across 38 African countries and 300+ client companies, as of September 2026.
Tunga is not the right fit when the role has to be on site, when the work means talking to your clients in a language other than English or French, or when saving on cost is the main reason you're looking.
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