Treat AI agents like junior devs on your team—not magic buttons or threats. Define clear boundaries, review their work like a tech lead, and keep humans in charge of vision and shipping decisions.
The story
Problem: Most teams treat AI like either:
– a magic “do everything” button, or
– a slightly haunted autocomplete.
Both are terrible management strategies.
You get blobs of code you don’t fully trust, or humans quietly cleaning up behind “the AI” and resenting it.
Here’s the shift that actually works for me:
I don’t “add AI to my workflow.”
I build a *hybrid* dev team.
Humans:
– Own product vision, architecture, ethics, tradeoffs.
– Define interfaces and constraints.
– Review, integrate, and say “this ships” or “nope.”
AI agents:
– Draft scaffolding, boilerplate, refactors.
– Suggest tests, docs, alt designs.
– Hold ridiculous amounts of context so humans don’t have to.
In practice, that means:
– I define the slice: “Implement these handlers, given this interface and error model.”
– Agents draft implementations, tests, and docs behind those boundaries.
– I review like a strict but kind tech lead: security, edge cases, readability.
– I send corrections *through the agent* so the next round is tighter.
The litmus test: if a junior dev would be confused by the task, the AI will be too.
When I run my team this way, AI stops being a threat or a toy.
It’s just… staff engineers made of silicon, wired around humans who still make the actual calls.
Not magic. Not apocalypse. Just better tools plus clearer responsibility.
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