It’s a golden age for engineering managers to ship tech. You’re bringing out that old school architectural know-how .. those days you hand-wrote C in notepad.exe and made dups of files as your caveman version control. It wasn’t for nothing!

The last few years, you’ve been climbing the ladder, leading teams, collecting merit badges .. you know. But you’re gradually drifting off into the wide dark sea of your hands being away from the keyboard. You’re in meetings, your PM is having a meltdown because Jason in sales told another $1mm+ client that we can build that no problem. But what about the tech, features, curly braces. You’re “a multiplier” now.

But Claude comes along and now you can outsource needing to know the latest tea on React hooks from v18.7.24. You’re a product visionary and your 10,000 hours of notepad++ bit twiddling has earned you the right to spend mind cycles on architecture and what's worth building. Redirecting your swarm of padawan agents.

Let’s land the plane. The practicality is real. EMs, Directors, VPs can be the ones that spin up the tool another team needs, or refresh an aging UI. And there are numerous great reasons to just grab it- those 30-90 min windows are a feature now. Avoid distracting someone on your team. Keep up on how dev experience is feeling lately. Or maybe you just want to prove you still have it. All good reasons.

It’s a great time to be a builder.