Engineering leadership

Engineering leadership now includes deciding how people learn, review, and take responsibility for software built with agents. We examine the relationship between experienced operators and new builders, the evidence behind productivity claims, and the work required to carry a change into production.

The apprenticeship AI does not replace
Shopify is expanding internships while embracing coding agents. The more useful workforce question is how quickly a new engineer learns to own the result.
The builder’s advantage
The FDEs are coming. Sam Sweilem on agentic engineering, private AI, and the cost of waiting for consensus.
Before the rewrite, prove the behavior
AI can accelerate the construction of a replacement. The difficult modernization decision is knowing which obligations the new system must preserve—and when it can take over.
Andrej Karpathy and the new value of engineering judgment
As coding agents take on more implementation, the scarce skill shifts toward context, verification, and understanding what the software should do.