Robert Ta argues that engineering teams resist AI tools because they fear job loss. He recommends treating adoption like a product: find the engineers already using Copilot and Cloud Code, let them teach others, then update career frameworks and compensation to reward AI proficiency.
We have a customer with like 2,000 engineers, designers, product managers, and there's a lot of fear around, oh, am I being replaced? Am I just like training these robots to replace me or whatever? And I could tell you that the innovators— so when I say innovators at your org, there's going to be people that are looking at the latest drops from Cloud Code, from Codex. They're on Twitter. They're looking at the latest open source repos that— or new skills that are efficacious. They're looking at like RSI, like they're on top of it in your org. These are the AI-pilled people. So the goal is figure out how they're working. Can you then take some of those those people that are also good at educating and training others and then get their early adopters going and do the same thing and just keep going and just keep going and treat that AI adoption like a product. That's all you got to do. Taking a step back, if I were management, head of product or head of engineering, I would think about what are the carrots and the sticks that I could use as managerial levers to then move my people to do more like the innovators, to take on and adopt more of these recomposition capabilities and skills and workflows that we're seeing with, you know, going from Copilot era to Harness era to Agentic shift to now this recomp. I would ask every manager out there, look at your career framework. Have you named these things? If you have not, go talk about it with your colleagues and go figure out some changes because the people that are not leaning into the tools do not have a carrot to go figure this out. And now we have some great language from thought leaders like Boris from the Cloud Code Team.
