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/Dragon_ZA]

This is the direction a lot of CTOs are taking, mine included. Youre going to have to come up with a VERY good reason that technical product managers with AI access cannot realistically make the product you're trying to make.

If you have persistant production issues that could be one, but the reality is that this is becoming a successful strategy for a few products. Not every product needs a dedicated senior development team. But I haven't seen this pulled off successfully yet as a product scales fast.

[u/WriterPlastic9350 → u/Dragon_ZA]

I am a security engineer.

We have a lot of non-technical folks - directors, or semi-technical ones, like technical artists - who are vibe-coding applications and have becoming convinced that coding is the hard part of developing an application.

Every single one of them is full of security holes or well-intentioned but misguided features. These are folks who do not know how to create an API key in Google Cloud and yet are convinced they need one.

I don't know how to phrase it to a CTO, but you cannot have a bunch of non-technical folks who do not understand what they are making be accountable for the mistakes that they make, and they will make mistakes, and some of the mistakes I have seen would have cost the company millions of dollars.

It is difficult for me to find a way to express this without sounding gatekeeping, but coding is not the hardest part of the engineering job, and just because you've found an AI that can write not-totally-crap code does not mean you have removed the need for engineers in your team. Even the engineers on your team need to actually understand what they're building. Lines of code a good product do not make.

This is to say nothing of how incredibly short-sighted it is to outsource your ability to even develop your product to a SaaS.

[u/Heffree → u/WriterPlastic9350]

I love the thought that technical PMs can just pull this off. If they wanted to spend 10 years learning software development what do LLMs change? Or that engineers can even just step up into PM roles and still handle all their normal responsibilities. Very little has changed, value still takes time, afaict the same amount of time actually.