If I see ONE MORE AI slop blog post, I’m gonna scream. Or maybe not scream, but at least unsubscribe from your feed. And then I’ll probably loudly and overconfidently decree that blogging is dead. That said, I have a lot of uncorralled thoughts about the tech industry that I’ve been asking a lot of friends, peers, and colleagues to pick apart the past few months. As I’ve been picking the brains of EMs at other tech companies, I’ve heard their thoughts range from “I want to burn the whole thing to the ground right now” to “AI has empowered so many people to move faster, take risks, and do more, and we might not even need pure engineers in the future.” I don’t know specifically where I land on this spectrum just yet.
I don’t want to burn it all to the ground. And in fact, in certain measurable ways AI is clearly making me notably faster, and I’m not just saying that as a metrics-obsessed EM. I’ve seen evidence from other companies that they’re seeing the same, too.
That said, I’ve seen enough troubling AI slop PRs come in recently that I have at times wondered how sustainable things are right now. Is this AI slop, from an EM’s perspective, just a performance management issue, or does it point to a broader systemic issue around how the software engineering ecosystem is evolving?
All that to say, I don’t know the answer to this yet, and I want to explore it in my own writings. The one thing I do know: this is the biggest engineering leadership challenge of our era. So, long live the blog!