{"slug": "the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers", "title": "The PM Trap: AI Won't Turn Engineers into Managers", "summary": "As AI tools like LLMs automate boilerplate coding, some companies mistakenly expect engineers to shift into project management roles. However, engineers must remain hands-on with complex debugging and system architecture to develop the intuition needed for real problem-solving. Organizations that treat engineering as ticket-shuffling risk building fragile systems and losing their technical edge.", "body_md": "# The mud and the mind\n\n· 2 min read\n\nIn [my previous article](/posts/the_five_pillars_of_post_ai_interview) I discussed about the necessary evil to change the coding tests to filter engineers.\n\nAs LLMs become the ultimate coders (producing boilerplate infinitely, instantly, and without fatigue) the software engineering workflow is rapidly shifting, and day-to-day work is moving heavily toward auditing and reviewing AI-generated code.\n\nBut because of this shift, a dangerous corporate fantasy is taking root: the belief that engineers should simply become project managers. But let us not confuse this evolution with a retreat.\n\n**Becoming an auditor does not mean keeping your hands clean.**\n\nExpecting engineers to simply shuffle tickets and prompt LLMs is a profound misunderstanding of the craft. An engineer’s primary output has never been code but has always been **deep thought** on how to efficiently solve a problem.\n\nTo solve a problem, you will need *intuition*.\n\nTo develop intuition you need *experience*.\n\nAnd to gain experience you definitely need to ** put your hands in the mud** and break your teeth on walls of complex archiecture.\n\nYou might ask yourself: “*if writing boilerplate syntax is no longer the mud, so what is?*”.\n\nWe need to redefine where the hard work actually happens in software engineering. The mud is no longer writing REST controllers, or scaffolding a CRUD application. The mud is profiling memory leaks in production. It is tracing unpredictable latency spikes across a distributed system. It is staring at obscure telemetry logs at 3 AM because your beautifully Claude-generated architecture introduced a silent race condition that only appears under heavy load.\n\nThat is where engineering happens and where engineers are needed.\n\nThat is the mud.\n\nAnd this brings us to the ultimate reality check: *accountability*.\n\nYou can automate the creation, but you cannot automate the responsibility, because\nLLMs and Agents can write the boilerplate but they cannot suffer the consequences of a bad design.\nAt the end of the day, **you do**, and this is what you get paid for.\n\nCompanies that confuse engineering with mere ticket-shuffling will inevitably build fragile, incomprehensible black boxes, and if an organization expects you to be a PM rather than a deep technical thinker, they have already lost the plot.\n\nIn this special case I have an advice: ignore them, and **solve problems in places where the real problems to solve are**.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers", "canonical_source": "https://carette.xyz/posts/the_mud_and_the_mind/", "published_at": "2026-06-13 09:43:26+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-13 09:50:01.961556+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-agents", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Claude"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-pm-trap-ai-won-t-turn-engineers-into-managers.jsonld"}}