Remember when a five‑digit Stack Overflow score was a flex?
Today that, and a vintage 2022 playbook will buy you precisely zero leverage.
Yesterday’s job, tomorrow’s irrelevance
Many Engineering managers still run on three rituals:
- Status ✨astrology✨ or endless forecasting of ticket constellations. Hours massaging burndown charts, Jira dashboards, stand‑up forecasts – cargo‑cult evidence that the sprint is “on track”.
- Stakeholder
appeasementmanagement: slide decks, project reviews, “quick syncs” to keep exec egos fed and legal teams comfy. - People babysitting – counting story points, asking to update Jira, tolerance checks for burnout, sniffing out AI-powered overemployment. By the way, did you know of r/overemployed?
However, none of those moves the product faster. Meanwhile, AI agents are quietly doing code reviews, generating boilerplate, even writing RFCs. The org chart hasn’t noticed — yet.
If your weekly calendar is still dominated by those three activities, you may be managing the past, not the product. Time to trade status astrology for AI‑native capacity planning, stakeholder appeasement for impact analytics, and people babysitting for skill‑building in an AI‑assisted workplace (because we all are/will be part of one).
✱ Reality check: GitHub’s 2024 telemetry shows that 55% of new code in top repos comes straight from Copilot suggestions. The velocity conversation has already moved from “How fast are we?” to “How are we capitalizing on AI throughput?” (just ask your friendly CEO, if you’ve got one)
Developers feel the tremor first
- The honest ones use AI to 10× business impact.
- The creative‑to‑a‑fault ones use it to hold two (three?) jobs at once.
- The oblivious ones… keep closing tickets – until inevitably, the job market forces them into uncomfortable, exposing interviews.
Either way, the ground is shifting under every keyboard. Take Cursor: not an IDE on steroids but an autonomous engineer that rewrites entire modules if you feed it the right project rules.
Add a Docker or Terraform integration with MCP and it ships infrastructure while you refill coffee ☕️
Your definition of “team capacity” just doubled — without a head‑count req.
What AI‑native tech management demands
Track impact, not story points
Ditch velocity charts. Spin up a lightweight “AI‑impact dashboard” that shows:
- % of code written or reviewed by agents
- Defect rate/amounts before vs. after AI suggestions
- Cycle‑time saved per feature
One glance, and any exec sees why the bots are worth the budget.
Budget for capacity, not headcount
A productive agent is a part‑timer who never sleeps. So treat it that way:
- Calculate “agent hours” (uptime × avg throughput)
- Add them to human hours for a true capacity number
- Keep an eye on prompt‑library reuse and GPU spend, not just salaries
Hire the abstraction thinkers
Fancy tech stacks date fast. The skill of turning fuzzy problems into powerful prompts lasts. Swap “N years of X” for interview tasks like:
Use any AI tool to prototype a solution in 30 min — then walk us through the guardrails you’d add.Cut the dead steps
If an agent can lint, test, or generate first‑pass docs, remove that checkpoint from the process.
Less ceremony → faster merges → happier humans.
Ignore it and pay twice
- Personal risk: your team ships slower than an intern‑and‑GPT duo; reorg rumors start.
- Org risk: competitors halve go‑to‑market time; you’re still begging the CTO for a Copilot license.
History doesn’t punish the late adopter gently.
Your 90-day pivot plan
- Learn the lingo: spend a weekend with an LLM playground. Write three real prompts that hit prod code.
- Ship an AI pilot: pick one pain‑point (on‑call runbooks, migration scripts, report generation) and automate it end‑to‑end.
- Refactor hiring: replace “N years of TypeScript” with “Proves they can orchestrate AI tools to solve X”.
- Measure and communicate: report cycle‑time delta, not tool novelty. Execs fund what they can graph.
Trailblaze or trail behind
The AI revolution won’t send a calendar invite. It will simply replace next quarter’s burndown with a release note that never needed you. Which line will have your name on?
Had no time to draw or make photos: Cursor kept me too busy 🤷♂️
Nice one! 😀