𝖲𝗁𝖺𝗒𝗇𝖾 𝖢𝗈𝗅𝖾 | Humanity-centered AI

Just got this DM from a follower: Hey dude, I need to vent this to someone who gets it. I've been at this Big Tech company (you know the one) for almost 6 years now—senior SWE, TC around $350k last year with RSUs still vesting. Thought I was bulletproof after surviving the 2023-2024 bloodbaths and then pivoting hard into the AI org. But fuck, the ground is shifting under my feet faster than I can keep up. Last week in our all-hands, leadership was bragging about how the team's "AI leverage ratio" hit 4.2x—meaning each engineer is now shipping what used to take a team of four. They showed the metrics: feature velocity up 180% YoY while headcount's down another 22% since Q4 '25. The slide literally had a photo of Cursor + Claude Sonnet 4 workflows replacing entire squads. Everyone clapped like trained seals, but I saw three faces go pale—they're the mid-level folks who just finished documenting their entire codebase for the "knowledge distillation" project. My direct report, this solid L5 who joined right after me, got put on a 30-day PIP after his productivity dashboard dipped below the new AI-augmented benchmark. The benchmark? It's literally what the offshore team in India hits using the exact prompts he used to write. He trained them on our internal style guide last quarter—now they're outperforming him at $28/hour all-in. He told me privately he's burning through savings and eyeing real estate licensing because "at least houses don't get refactored by agents overnight." The internal job board is a ghost town. Entry-level SWE roles? Frozen since mid-'25. What few postings go up are tagged "AI-native preferred" and get 2,000+ apps in hours, mostly from people already on H-1Bs or contractors. Meanwhile, they're quietly converting more mid-tier positions to "AI orchestration" contractors—$90-110/hour remote from LATAM or Eastern Europe, no benefits, 6-month contracts. My manager admitted in 1:1 that if the next Grok/Claude/Anthropic release closes the last 10-15% quality gap, we'll probably cut another layer. I'm hanging on because I'm one of the ones who owns the prompt libraries and fine-tuning pipelines now. They need humans to babysit the models until the self-improving loops actually work without constant human intervention. But I see the writing: every time we make the system more autonomous, we make our own roles more optional. The alumni Slack is full of 2024-2025 grads DMing for coffee chats because their referrals bounce—67% underemployed or gigging according to the last poll. One kid I mentored last year is back living with parents after burning through his signing bonus. I used to tell people "just upskill in AI, you'll be fine." Now I feel like a fraud saying it. If I lost this tomorrow, I'd be competing with the same offshore talent I've been helping scale, plus a flood of recently "managed out" seniors. My emergency fund is decent, but the mortgage isn't. Thinking about side hustles in trades or something offline—plumbing, electrical, anything that can't be prompted away. This feels like watching the industry eat itself from the inside while pretending it's evolution. You still feeling secure over there, or is it hitting your shop too? Need to hear I'm not going insane.

I no longer feel like I can use an EM dash when writing for fear people think it’s AI.

This is the best explanation I have heard of how AI is impacting the software landscape. Not just the stocks, but the actual fundamentals of the businesses underneath From AI Czar David Sacks himself "You take a product like Salesforce that deals with all your customer contracts and revenue. You are not going to replace that with code that has been spit out of a coding assistant that has not been fully vetted Think about how many bug reports on Salesforce's code base over the last 25 years. Maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises The idea that you are just going to rip out that system and replace with code that has been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday, with a small team to maintain it internally, just does not seem realistic to me"

Happy Birthday to Mike Patton. Remember that time him and Faith No More went on the Conan O’Brien show in 1995 and payed it for laughs. From the humour vault. Enjoy! Happy Birthday Mike!🎉🎂🥳

Last September I announced mandatory return-to-office. Five days a week. I called it a "culture-first initiative." Culture means presence. Presence means badge swipes. Badge swipes mean metrics. Metrics mean I can prove something to the board. I don't know what. But I can prove it. The announcement went out on a Tuesday. I sent it from my home office. In Aspen. I have an exemption. "Strategic leaders require location flexibility to maintain global perspective." I wrote that policy. HR approved it. HR approves everything I write. By Wednesday, 340 employees had updated their LinkedIn status to "Open to Work." I called it "natural attrition." Natural attrition means they quit before I had to pay severance. Very natural. We lost 47 engineers in the first month. I told the board it was "alignment correction." The people who left weren't aligned. With coming to an office. That I also don't come to. But that's different. I'm strategic. The office costs $4.2 million per year. Empty, it was a write-off. Now it's a "collaboration hub." I measured collaboration. Average daily Zoom calls from the office: 7.4 per employee. They commute 45 minutes. To take calls they could take from home. But now they're "present." Presence is culture. I've never been more certain of anything. A senior engineer asked why we couldn't stay remote. She had metrics. Productivity was up 23% during remote work. I said, "Productivity isn't everything." She asked what else mattered. I said, "Serendipitous collisions." She asked how we measure serendipitous collisions. I said, "You can't. That's what makes them serendipitous." She stopped asking questions. Then she stopped showing up. Then LinkedIn said she's at a company that's "remote-first." Good luck with that. They'll learn. We installed badge tracking software. It cost $380,000. It tells me exactly when people arrive. And when they leave. And how long they spend in each zone. I check it every morning. From home. The data is fascinating. Average arrival time: 9:47 AM. Average departure time: 4:12 PM. I sent a Slack message. "Core hours are 9 to 6." Arrival times shifted to 9:02 AM. Departure times shifted to 6:01 PM. Productivity did not change. But the metrics look better. Metrics are culture. We have a "hybrid" option now. Three days in office. Mandatory Monday. Mandatory Wednesday. Mandatory Friday. That's called "hybrid." Because Tuesday and Thursday are optional. But there are "anchor meetings" on Tuesday and Thursday. Attendance is "strongly encouraged." "Strongly encouraged" means mandatory without the liability. I learned that from legal. The head of product asked if he could work from home when his wife had surgery. I said, "Of course. Family comes first." Then I said, "But let's revisit your Q4 performance targets." He came to the office. His wife understood. I assume. I didn't ask. That's personal. The CFO asked about ROI on the RTO policy. I showed him the badge data. "Presence is up 340%." He asked if revenue was up. I said, "Revenue is a lagging indicator." He asked what the leading indicator was. I said, "Badge swipes." He nodded. The lease renews next year. Seven more years. $29 million committed. We needed bodies in the building. Now we have bodies. Fewer than before. But present. Morale is down. Glassdoor says we're "hostile to work-life balance." I told HR to respond. They wrote, "We're a high-performance culture that values in-person collaboration." That's corporate for "the review is accurate." But it sounds like a rebuttal. The CEO asked if RTO was working. I said, "Absolutely." He asked for evidence. I showed him a photo of the office. Full desks. Glowing monitors. Bodies in chairs. He smiled. "This is what culture looks like." It looked like a stock photo. Because I got it from a stock photo website. The real office has 40% occupancy on a good day. But he doesn't know that. He's also remote. We're both strategic. Next quarter I'm proposing a "collaboration bonus." $2,000 for anyone with 95% badge-in compliance. The bonus costs less than the turnover. And it shifts the narrative. We're not forcing people to come in. We're "incentivizing presence." Incentivizing means paying people to do something they don't want to do. It's different from mandating. Legally. The employees who stayed are "loyal." Loyalty means they have mortgages. And kids in school districts. And RSUs that haven't vested. They're not loyal. They're trapped. But on paper, it looks like loyalty. And paper is what the board sees. I've been doing this for 22 years. I know what culture looks like. It looks like butts in seats. Butts in seats mean control. Control means management. Management means me. RTO isn't about productivity. It never was. It's about seeing people. So I know they exist. So I know they're working. So I know I'm in charge. That's culture. As long as the badge swipes go up and to the right.