Bots won’t build teams

Charity Majors argues cogently that generative AI, whatever its abilities, will never build your engineering team. In fact, she notes a kind of time bomb inherent in the oft-repeated assertion that you can replace a bunch of junior engineers with AI: what happens, years from now, after you’ve destroyed any path for people to become senior engineers? There’s a kind of magical thinking to much AI hype, as if the senior staff who can competently judge the output of that AI will appear fully formed, drawn forth from the CTO’s head. In reality, senior engineers need training and opportunities to learn on the job, as they always have. Go ahead and use AI to automate drudgery, if you can; but presume it will let you slide off the bottom half of your payroll at your peril.