We're All Managers Now: My Journey Into AI-Assisted Development

A former engineering manager at Chime describes his sabbatical journey into AI-assisted development, exploring how AI tools are reshaping software engineering and warning that managers risk becoming obsolete if they fail to stay current with AI advancements.

What does the future of software engineering look like? Everybody is trying to figure out the answer to that question right now. This article shares the journey I’ve been on for the past couple of months toward discovering that answer for myself. A few months ago I left my job as an engineering manager EM at a FinTech company Chime to take a sabbatical to have more time and energy to work on my own projects, ideas and interests. In retrospect, another reason was that I could see myself falling out of date with respect to the AI tooling that is available now and I wanted to have time to explore that more. Having been a manager for the past four years, I could tell that I was in danger of becoming out of touch and being one of those managers that people don’t take seriously because they are still referring to how things were done 10 or 20 years ago.