Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

I'm watching a divide emerge in real time.

2 groups of engineers. Both are using the same AI tools. But 1 group is about to become completely obsolete.

Let me explain what I'm seeing. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

The Death of the 1x Engineer

Why many engineers will become valueless—and how to build a team of those who won't.

The engineers I know think about AI in 1 of 2 ways.

The 1st group treats it as a tool for labor reduction. Their internal dialogue sounds like this: "Great, now I can get the machine to write the code so I don't have to."

They treat the tools like offshore labor, just cheaper.

They clock in. They use AI to minimize effort. They clock out.

And look, I get it. That was the dominant perspective for several years.

But that era is over.

While these engineers are conserving effort, another group is doing something completely different.

The Engineers Who Will Win

The engineers who will dominate the next decade are using AI to do more.

They wake up every morning excited to work with AI tools. Their driving question is, "What can I try with AI that I haven't thought of?"

They're testing more, learning more, and shipping more.

Because they're having fun, they're accelerating past their peers at a rate that's impossible to match.

I'm seeing this first-hand with our customers. The ones who have idea people at the helm—especially if the CEO has ideas but isn't hyper-technical—are swarming us. We literally can't keep up with demand.

They're so excited by what AI can deliver that ideas come faster than anyone could possibly execute on them.

When people like this have AI tools in their hands and have already worked up the expertise curve, they can produce 20x what they were able to do before.

Why Efficiency Misses the Point

AI can help you write fewer lines of code. But that's the least interesting thing about it.

The real power is that it lets you run more experiments. You can test more ideas and iterate faster than ever before.

For the engineer who sees AI as a way to clock in and clock out, this is doomsday. They've become essentially replaceable because AI can already do that. They don't see the possibilities and want to maintain more of the same by riding the status quo.

But the engineer who wakes up thinking about what they can build just got a superpower.

We've taken the 10x engineer problem, doubled it, and exported it to every line of work. If you see AI as a tool to minimize effort instead of maximize exploration, you're in trouble.

What This Means for Hiring

If you're building a team right now, you need to filter for 2 traits: curiosity and playfulness.

The engineers worth hiring treat AI as an amplifier.

To sniff this out, ask them what excites them most about AI.

If the answer is "I can get my work done faster," that's a red flag.

If the answer is "I'm experimenting with things I couldn't have built 6 months ago," or "I've been able to build something I've spent years dreaming about," you've found someone worth paying attention to.

BEFORE YOU GO…

The gap between these two groups is only going to widen as the technology improves.

The engineers who view AI as a way to do less might be jobless in 24 months. Fortunately for them, if there's something else they'd be having more fun doing, AI expands opportunities there, too.

We're entering a world where anyone can work on what they enjoy every day.

That's exactly why you shouldn't settle for engineers who want to do less.

Build a team of those who can't wait to do more.

Talk soon,

Chris.