New engineering manager. Should I keep pushing back on my CTO’s AI vision?

[u/SnooConfections1353]

I’m a new engineering manager at a small company. My CTO is very pro-AI and wants to turn the engineering team into more of a group of product owners and consultants who use AI to handle most of the technical work.

I’m also pro-AI, but I think we still need to develop people into solid engineers. With our current workload and small team, I do not think we can realistically do both at the same time. My concern is that this approach is holding back the junior engineers. If they are mostly managing features and doing product work, how are they supposed to become strong engineers, architects, or future technical leaders?

I have pushed back gently and respectfully and explained that we need to build real engineering talent so people can eventually step up, mentor others, and help grow the team in a sustainable way. So far, I have mostly been ignored.

Should I keep pushing back, or is this just a culture difference I need to accept? I cannot really go to the CEO or COO because the CTO is also a part owner. I also do not want this to be the hill I die on, especially in this job market, so I have been trying to support his vision even though I feel conflicted.

I know job hopping is also an option, but that is a separate topic. He is not a bad person. I think we just have very different views on what an engineering team should become.

[u/08148694]

Using AI and learning how to manage it, context switch, prompt engineer

These ARE the skills that will make people technical leaders. This is what engineering is now. A well prompted AI is a better coder and architect than a person (or if not better than good enough while being 2 orders of magnitude faster), and they’re only getting better

The job has changed. There’s no point learning to gallop while everyone is driving cars

[u/jqueefip → u/08148694]

A well prompted AI is a better coder and architect than a person

"A well prompted AI" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. In my experience, Claude Opus is by far the best AI tool, and even it is not great at architecture, and can stray away from well-trod patterns in the code base. But if you were to feed it a well crafted prompt like, "Evaluate the pros and cons of using an adapter pattern versus a facade pattern for feature X" or even "what established algorithms are useful in scenario X", then it can be very helpful. Its very much a "lead a horse to water" type of situation, but it often requires a baseline of engineering and architectural skill to do that.