Justin Conway

the way we coach engineers is probably gonna change a bit What used to be valuable input from great eng manager / tech lead is now actively harmful to engineers as they try to learn in the new world of ai-first dev in the old world, you could just say "make sure you check here, here, and here when building this". They would internalize learnings as they ingested the comment and translated it into action - searching, editing, etc but now a new engineer can just verbatim copy that comment into a coding agent prompt, and get the same result. in my experience the best human learning part happens when you have to work to translate one thing into another so what's the thing a coach can give an engineer to help them go from "input from coach" to "good steering for the agent" they don't just have to learn to design and implement, they have to learn something else now too... some new higher-order thing like anything you can learn this over time w/ vibes, but like everything, a coach should help you grow/learn faster. AND even worse, if you're just handed the answer, you wont learn it.