Ai on guy@secdev.uk

The New Shape of the Engineering Team

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If AI can handle the boilerplate, the scaffolding, and a growing portion of routine implementation, what does that mean for how we compose engineering teams? It’s a question I’ve been turning over for a while now, and the answers I keep arriving at are uncomfortable.

The optimistic version is that AI frees engineers to focus on higher-value work, system design, problem framing, user understanding, architectural thinking. The pessimistic version is that it eliminates the entry-level work that junior engineers have traditionally used to learn the craft. The realistic version is probably somewhere in between, and navigating it well is one of the most important challenges facing technical leaders right now.

Rethinking Developer Productivity in the Age of AI Assistants

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lines of code per day was always a terrible productivity metric. With AI coding assistants, it’s become an absurd one. An engineer with Copilot or a similar tool can generate code at a pace that would have been unimaginable five years ago. If you’re measuring productivity by volume, every engineer just got a 3x raise. If you’re measuring it by value delivered, the picture is more complicated.

The more I’ve explored how AI assistants change engineering workflows, the more I’ve realised that the productivity conversation needs a fundamental reset. We’re not just doing the same work faster, we’re changing what the work is.

The AI Literacy Gap: Why Your Leadership Team Needs to Catch Up

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the emergance of AI/GenAI, I felt that I needed to think, and write, about the impact of AI/GenAI on technology leadership. The next series of articles will be exporing this topic. As an emerging topic, these articles may well be shorter, and I will try and publish them weekly when possible.

Most engineering leadership teams I talk to have a wide spread of AI understanding. On one end, you’ve got the enthusiasts, they’ve built agents, they use AI coding assistants daily, they can explain transformer architectures over a pint. On the other end, you’ve got leaders who haven’t meaningfully engaged with any of it. They’ve read the headlines, they’ve sat through a vendor demo, and they’re quietly hoping this is a hype cycle that will pass.