RULE: Every Candid developer gets paid Claude Code + Cursor (or Copilot). ~$30-40/mo/person is not a real number against the productivity lift.

rule·Scope: business·Status: current

Created 2026-05-22

Rule: Every developer at Candid gets paid Claude Code Pro ($20/mo) and either Cursor ($20/mo) or VS Code + Copilot ($10/mo).

Why: Total cost ~$30-40/mo/person. Against any plausible productivity lift (see AI-assisted dev productivity 2026: published evidence ranges from 21-28% speedup (GovTech) to 19% slowdown (METR RCT) — honest ceiling is 1.3-1.7× for fluent users), the ROI is trivial.

How to apply: part of standard developer onboarding. Build a private skill/prompt library (a prompts/ folder in the agency template repo) for: Astro component scaffolding, content collection schemas, CSS architecture patterns, accessibility audits, INP investigation playbook.

Threshold to revisit: if delivered output per developer-week isn't up by Q3 2026, the workflow needs revisiting, not the tools.

Referenced by (1)

reference AI-assisted dev productivity 2026: published evidence ranges from 21-28% speedup (GovTech) to 19% slowdown (METR RCT) — honest ceiling is 1.3-1.7× for fluent users · relates-to