Engineering Management After the Cost of Code Collapsed

Engineering Management After the Cost of Code Collapsed

As an engineering director, I found that while LLMs collapsed code production costs, many old management rules still hold. We must audit assumptions: practices relying on writing speed are obsolete, but those based on human coordination and trust remain vital. The real challenge now is measuring outcomes over volume, defining machine-checkable correctness, and solving the unsolved problem of training future senior engineers.

The boundary is a strategic variable: Teams with strong specs get the full benefit of cheap checking, while teams with weak specs get generated code reviewed by the same machine that generated it.

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2026-07-25