Somewhere in the last year, a bunch of us who hadn’t shipped real code in years quietly started shipping again. Not reviewing it. Not architecting it in a doc and handing it off. Actually building it. And loving it.
I lead software for a living. That means my days are meetings, roadmaps, hiring, unblocking people, and saying “no” a lot. The last time “writing code” was my actual job was a long time ago. I never stopped being able to code — I stopped having the time to code. At least in my day job. There’s a difference, and every engineering leader reading this feels it in their bones.
If you identify with this post and you are in a manager position, please heed my warning. Throw away your prototypes. Stop vibing “quick fixes to unblock me”. Stop trying to help your devs because you think you’re superman now. You are only pissing everyone off, I promise. The devs who didn’t stop coding while you were off doing important manager/product stuff are the ones who understand what’s best for the codebase. And yes, they also know how to use LLMs.
Just because you feel like you have a new superpower doesn’t mean that everyone needs to be saved. Follow the damn engineering process.
100%
I got this my superior who decided AI allowed them to code fixes and we were stuck with buggy code that wasn’t merged, because the superior had moved on to a more important task requiring more AI “support” and couldn’t process the comments. Things could’ve been faster had we implemented things ourselves.
When you aren’t out in the fields dealing with stuff, you don’t know what’s important to the workers. “Jumping in” for a minute to do a task might actually slow down the team if understanding of day to day struggles isn’t present.
I’m contributing story execution. And my goal is to contribute like any other team member. My code gets reviewed. Harshly because I don’t know all the norms for this code base. And honestly it’s great because to be a technical lead I feel like I should know the code way better than I’ve had time to.