#32 - A Great Engineer in the Age of AI

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article titled, Your CEO Should Stress You Out. I wrote it because my CEO stresses me out.

His posture towards AI is one of the ways. He’s always trying out new AI tools, seeing if they can give us more leverage to move faster and grow bigger while keeping the team lean.

That’s the exact right thing to do, and if I were a rational human being, I’d see it that way.

The problem is — I’m not rational. I’m a practicing software engineer that has had to watch AI rapidly improve at doing the things he’s spent years getting good at. Plus it’s doing those things faster, cheaper, and sometimes even *deep sigh*… better.

Every now and then, my ego compels me to tune out the AI news for a while. I did recently. And last week, just as I’d given myself enough time to slowly climb out of my existential hole, my CEO spartan kicks me back in by sending me this delightful opinion piece about “vibe coding”.

The writing is beautiful. The message is terrifying.

TL;DR: the promise of AI coding agents — the kind that can build features and fix bugs without supervision — is close to being realized.

Already, Cursor helps our team write code. Copilot helps us review PRs. Sentry helps us fix bugs. It can’t be too long before these disparate systems are piecemealed together with minimal human-in-the-loop.

Now if you’re new to my newsletter, (1) thanks for doubling my audience, and (2) you should know that I’m an AI optimist. On balance, I think AI is going to significantly grow the market for skilled labor. But I also think it’s going to significantly change what qualifies as skilled labor.

I spent 5 years becoming “skilled” as a person who writes code. But AI will code better soon. So then — what does it mean to be a great engineer in the age of AI?

For over a year now, I’ve been feeling around in the dark for an answer to that question. My fingertips have grazed one a few times but could never grab hold.

Until last weekend, when I was kicking it with a friend who works at the same company as me. We watched March Madness and ate a 2.6-pound poutine/shawarma freak-show called “The Meltdown”.

We also talked lightly about a couple of co-workers. We gushed a lot about one and grumbled a little about another.

For the one we admired, we talked about his clear thinking. His approach to problem-solving. How his love of the game inspires the hell out of us. Ya, his code doesn’t take your breath away, but damn-near everything else does.

For the one we had feedback for, we talked about his tendency to get distracted. His lack of rigour when testing his work. And how it was hard to feel like you could rely on him to get his tasks done on schedule. Ya, he writes code as good as anyone, but he isn’t the easiest to collaborate with.

And that’s when I finally wrapped my arms around the answer I’d been grasping for: great engineering is about great process. And it always has been.

At my current startup, Wednesday Waffles, 2.5 part-time devs got an app on the App store and earned 3,000 users in 4 months. I’m really proud of that, but honestly we could have done it in 2 if we weren’t so busy stepping on each other’s toes in the codebase. Or merging PRs without discussing them first. Or prioritizing features over bugs. Or choosing the wrong thing to work on entirely.

At times it felt like anyone of us working alone could have moved faster than all of us combined, and it’s only now that I feel like we’re firing on all cylinders. Not because we’re vastly better Flutter developers than we were 4 months ago, but because we started to establish systems and decision making frameworks with the discipline to stick to them.

My problem isn’t that AI is devaluing my coding ability. My problem is that I ever thought my coding ability was what was valuable in the first place.

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See you next week — Rayhan