I believe the way we think about engineering leadership, team building, management, and organizational structure is about to change drastically with the rise of agentic tooling.
The Path from Code to Leadership
Early in my career, I worked alongside an engineer who had come from Google. This was the first person who truly impressed—and frankly, intimidated—me with their programming ability. I'd worked with good engineers before, people who seemed maybe a year or three ahead of me on a path I could eventually follow. But this person was different. They wrote lambda calculus functions in JavaScript for fun. Watching them work, I thought, “If this is what it takes to be a staff or principal engineer, I don't know if it's worth it.” This person didn't just work with code—they breathed, ate, and slept it.
This reminds me of something Steve Jobs always believed: the best technologists aren't just coders—they're poets, musicians, and artists who happen to write code. He insisted that Apple's programmers would always be better than Microsoft's because they understood music, poetry, and beauty. At the time, working with this intimidating Google engineer, I thought I was witnessing Jobs' ideal in action. I was wrong.
As I progressed in my career, an opportunity emerged when a former boss recognized something in me: an ability to lead people, translate technical complexity for non-technical stakeholders, build alliances instead of burning bridges, and understand that programming wasn't just about writing code—it was about solving problems. This launched my journey into people leadership.
I moved from line management to managing managers, then to directing departments. Now I lead engineering at Berry Street. During my time here, I've had the privilege of witnessing the rise of agentic tools from the ground up: ChatGPT, Claude, Devin, Codex, and now my tool of choice, Claude Code.
Something interesting is happening. As I've explored these tools, my creativity has begun to flourish again. Like a seed dormant through winter, agentic tools provided the destratification needed to break through the hull and allow that creativity to germinate once more. It's not that I had lost my curiosity before—I would just get frustrated by my inability to debug Webpack, Babel, or TypeScript configs. When I wanted to spend a weekend coding, I wanted to build something, not untangle terrible configuration files.
The narrative I told myself was clear: I was meant to be an engineering manager. My code would never match that Google engineer's brilliance. But here's what I understand now that I didn't then: that engineer, for all their technical prowess, was optimizing for the wrong thing. They were a specialist in a world that was about to reward generalists.
The Fundamental Shift
Here's the pattern I see emerging: agentic tools are democratizing technical capability, which means raw coding skill is becoming less of a differentiator. The “intimidating expert” model—where technical depth alone determined career trajectory—is becoming obsolete. Instead, success will flow to those who can synthesize across domains, understand context, and create elegant solutions to messy problems.
I'm not alone in noticing this. I'm seeing it in conversations with other managers and leaders who chose the people path over the individual contributor track midway through their careers. These tools are re-sparking their creativity, allowing them to bypass the tedious obstacles that drove them away from hands-on coding in the first place. They can build again. Create again. And their efficiency multiplies because, fundamentally, they were always problem solvers, product builders, tinkerers, and curious individuals.
These tools are raising the floor, but more importantly, they're changing what the ceiling looks like. I believe we're entering a world where management, leadership, and organizational structures will be shaped by generalists—people who have seen enough across disciplines to understand how to build the right thing, navigate complex relationships, and synthesize diverse perspectives into effective solutions.
This will create organizations with small, lean teams of generalists driven by curiosity, ambition, creativity, and the ability to create impact quickly. I'm convinced we'll see managers and people leaders moving back to individual contributor roles. IC roles will shift indefinitely. The boundaries between manager, leader, and IC will merge into something new.
Leadership will become less about scope—the size of your department or the complexity of your codebase—and more about pure impact. Success will be measured by quick cycles, the ability to weave compelling narratives through complex product solutions, and the skill to right-size your approach. It will be about working effectively with others while understanding how business context shapes architecture, which in turn shapes how we build.
Will this transition be messy? Absolutely. Not everyone will make this shift successfully, and there will be awkward years where traditional hierarchies clash with this new reality. But the momentum is undeniable.
The Return of the Engineering Poets
To those early in their careers, to those coming of age in this new world: leverage this moment. The floor is being raised—use that to your advantage. Care deeply about your work. Show up consistently. Be an optimist. The glass is always half full, never half empty.
This is how you create a life where you're fulfilled in what you put your hand to.
We're moving toward a place where the engineering poets rule again—where science, liberal arts, and creativity merge into something powerful and new. Steve Jobs was right all along: the best technologists understand art, meaning, beauty, and romance, and they embody this understanding in the way they build and shape their tools.
I'm curious where this will all lead, but I have a feeling it's going somewhere none of us can predict. And that's exactly what makes it exciting.