> … why not keep your engineers and deliver 20x the value?

Probably because there isn’t actually an increase in demand for the capabilities of software, and engineers, product managers, and UI/UX designers are justifying the existence of their jobs by complicating software more than necessary.

Anyway, the essence of the article is that a “just say no” engineer is a person who knows how to use and enforce constraints so that complex systems remain manageable in the long-term; and that companies perceive such engineers to be irrelevant as AI coding tools become more mainstream.

I think that that has definitely happened, even with my own employer, but I think that companies of the same mindset just don’t have strong engineering cultures to begin with, and will be natural selected into oblivion during this wave of disruption, which already coincides with a prolonged period of economic uncertainty to begin with.

AI tools are great, but they are only as good as your people’s discernment. If you’re making AI adoption a KPI in your company, you’ve already lost sight of what your business is really about, and you’ll be bankrupt by your token spending before you can beat your competition.