The Junior Engineer Paradox
Engineering capability was earned through friction. You wrestled with syntax. You paged at 2 a.m. You learned why certain patterns were bad because you lived inside their failure modes. That friction is gone. But the struggle isn't. It's simply moving up the stack.
What AI-Powered Development Requires from Leadership
In the agentic era, execution is cheap but decision latency kills velocity. The solution isn't more coordination—it's architectural strategy with enough logic density that engineers can make good calls independently. Duplication beats meetings. Build the framework before you unleash the agents.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Counsel
Products of Counsel advise humans toward outcomes, not just answers. The moat isn't chat UI or data access—it's accumulated user context, domain judgment, and encoded expertise. Sycophancy and false confidence kill trust. Win by being worth believing, not by being liked.
GenAI Product Doctrine: Products of Judgement
Products of Judgment feed Products of Consequence. If your output is derived, not retrieved, the doctrine applies: confidence as first-class output, structured uncertainty, reasoning legible enough to investigate. Agents can't muddle. Make your signal good enough to act on.
The Dawning of the Age of the Arbiter
Organizational distance, layers between intent and execution, drove specialization for decades. AI agents collapse that distance, letting one engineer direct many without translation loss. The human role shifts from doer to arbiter: steering, judging, staying close to the craft.
The Coming PR Tsunami
LLMs broke the code production bottleneck, and now review is the constraint. The fix: small atomic PRs, LLM-generated summaries that compress comprehension time, and engineer-owned calibration. Teams that adapt stay ahead. Teams that wait drown in their own queues.
The Pass: Agentic Engineering
You are no longer the line cook. You are the executive chef at the pass, directing agents who compile, test, and retry at high speed. You may not type a single line of code, but you remain accountable for all of it. Your value shifts from labor to leadership.
