It's time to revise Jeff Bezos' famous '2-pizza rule' for the AI era, Cursor field CTO says

In the “tiny team” era of AI, your meeting doesn’t need as many pepperonis.

Jeff Bezos popularized the “two pizza rule,” the idea that any Amazon meeting should remain small enough to be fed with two pies.

The rule also influenced team sizes These days, many workplace teams have gotten even smaller.

David Pan, Cursor’s field CTO, put it simply: “RIP to the two pizza team.” Pan wrote on X that Bezos created an “all-time great metaphor,” one that shaped engineering for over twenty years. “He was right about small teams,” he wrote. “But in the AI era, two pizzas is too much pizza.” RIP to the two pizza team.

Jeff Bezos gave us an all-time great metaphor: keep the team small enough to feed with two pizzas.

It shaped how engineering orgs got built for 20+ years.

But in the AI era, two pizzas is too much pizza.

In the comments, users debated what the new metaphor should be.

One proposed the quarter-pizza team; another said it was the three-slice team.

Amazon writes that “ideally, this is a team of less than 10 people: smaller teams minimize lines of communication and decrease overhead of bureaucracy and decision-making.” “This allows two-pizza teams to spend more time focusing on their customers, and constantly experimenting and innovating on their behalf — the biggest priority of high-performing teams at Amazon,” the company’s website says.

Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of dating app company Match Group, told Business Insider that he was a fan in March.

Before Cursor, he worked at Amazon from 2011 to 2014 as an engineering manager, according to his LinkedIn.

There are also competing pressures on team sizes.

Some managers want smaller teams, with fewer people doing more tasks.

Others want bigger, flatter teams with fewer layers of management.

Those wide teams may need more pizzas.

Of course, many users commented that they themselves could devour the pies — even on a shrunken team. “I’ve learned that you all can eat a lot of pizza,” Pan commented in the wake of his initial post.