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You've essentially promoted yourself from coder to engineering manager, trading syntax fatigue for the mental marathon of refereeing specialized AI developers to ship v3-quality code on the first try.

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Indeed. AI is bumping everyone up to manager level, and having dealt with long PR feedback cycles with humans for years - I don't mind the promotion. Also shipping a v3 is so much nicer than shipping a v1 and dealing the all the corner cases in production.

Before AI, myself and everyone else I knew was drowning in tech debt. And now with AI we are treading water.

It's bumping to manager level, except without the 1:1s, quarterly/yearly planning, headcount and budget reviews, org/reorg discussions, performance calibration, and OKR planning. No complaints about the last review cycle or about the upcoming one.

Totally! But you know what? There are many, oh so many developers that are not ready, don't like and probably are not even cut for this kind of position.

All the ceremony must be replaced with process optimization, skill extraction, harness development and new model evals.

Still better than dealing with people, but only just.

Some see it as a promotion other (like me) as a demotion. I still prefer to do it myself, although I like code reviews done by AI, they do help to make code a bit better.

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