Will directors hand work straight to AI instead of engineers, according to A Life Engineered?

Steve Huynh cites Kun Chen, an L8 engineer at Meta, Atlassian and Microsoft, saying directors do not know what the code looks like and care only about outcomes. The guest agrees a director could type 'make the P95 latency better' into an LLM, so his advice is to make sure the director would still rather route that task through you, because you know the architecture and can direct the AI to the right places.

• The guest's horizon for this advice is about five years, the period he uses when mentoring junior engineers.
• He warns against the bad version: the engineer who builds a sneaky system for job security that nobody else understands.
• A senior manager delegating P95 work wants a list of options so they can weigh business costs such as the cloud services bill.

▸In their words

“Whatever it is you do with AI, make sure that someone at the director level still prefers to route that through you.” Guest · at 10:09 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-27). Read the whole episode summary →

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