There was a moment, sometime in 2023, when I started to feel it. Not panic, but a kind of alertness. The articles were everywhere. AI replacing engineers, entire roles becoming obsolete overnight. And there I was, managing a team of them.
I was never particularly worried. I've always believed that the human element in building software, the judgment, the relationships, the context that lives between people, isn't something that can be quietly absorbed by a model. But being confident isn't the same as being complacent. Something was shifting, and anyone not paying attention was going to be left behind.
So I paid attention.
The first thing I noticed wasn't that I had more time. It was that I had more headspace.
When the routine information-gathering starts taking care of itself, you stop carrying it around. And when you stop carrying it around, you start noticing things you were too busy to notice before. A pattern in how the team is communicating. A tension that hasn't surfaced yet but will. Someone who's been quietly coasting for two weeks.
That kind of noticing is the job. It always was. But it gets crowded out when you're spending energy on things that, in hindsight, didn't really need a human.
What changed wasn't my responsibilities. It was the resolution at which I could see them. And that difference compounds quietly. Better visibility leads to better conversations. Better conversations lead to better decisions. It's not dramatic. It's just incrementally, consistently better.
Here's what I keep coming back to. Someone having a bad week doesn't need a summary. They need someone to notice. A team losing momentum doesn't need a report. They need someone to ask the right question, at the right time, with enough context to actually do something about it.
That's not a workflow. It's not a prompt. It's presence. And presence is stubbornly, irreducibly human.
I think about this whenever I hear people worry about where managers and leaders fit in an AI-augmented world. The anxiety makes sense on the surface. If the tools get smart enough to track progress, surface blockers, and generate updates, what's left?
What's left is the reason any of that information mattered in the first place. Someone still has to decide what to do with it. Someone still has to have the conversation that changes how a person thinks about their work. Someone still has to hold the team together when things get hard and push them when things get comfortable.
AI made me better at finding information. It didn't get any closer to knowing what to do with it.
So, did AI change my job? Yes. Completely. And not at all.
The surface looks different. The way I prepare, the way I gather context, the way I show up to conversations. All of it has shifted. But the core hasn't moved an inch. People are still complicated. Teams are still unpredictable. And someone still needs to stand in the middle of all that complexity and make sense of it.
That someone isn't AI. Not in any way that actually matters.
The interesting question was never whether AI would replace me. It was what kind of leader you become when you stop spending energy on the wrong things.
I'm still figuring that out. But with a lot more clarity than I had three years ago.
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