Leadership on PHP Boy Scout

What burnout taught me (more than once)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I once did a hundred hours in a weekend. Seventy-two of them without sleep, before I gave up and had a lovely little nap on the staff-room sofa, halfway through the Monday morning meeting, in front of everyone. Nobody minded. We’d shipped the thing. And I can tell you, hand on heart, it was one of the happiest stretches of my whole career.

So whenever someone talks to me about burnout, and what they mean is the hours, the late nights, the grind… I nod along, but privately I know that’s not it. Not for me. The hours have never been the thing that broke me. I’ve been broken more than once over twenty-odd years, badly enough to frighten me, and not one of those times was about how many hours I’d worked. It took me the better part of two decades, and a very long conversation with myself, to work out what it actually was.

This is that.

The first time it wasn’t the hours

That hundred-hour weekend was at a Manchester agency, early in my career, back when I’d blagged my way into a lead role I had no business holding and then closed the gap in a blind panic because I had to. I loved it there. Loved the team I’d built around me. It was the first place I got my hands on infrastructure and system administration, the first place “DevOps” showed up as an idea before anyone had thought to name it, and the first place I learned the thing that’s dogged me ever since: the higher up the tree you climb, the more responsibility you have to reach out and claim.

What ended it wasn’t a deadline. We’d won a contract with a large radio broadcaster, who’d hired a consultant so peculiar he deserves his own post (and a couple of pints before I’ll tell it). He’d steered them toward a set of requirements that made no sense, we came back with an estimate built on a great deal of smoke and mirrors to make them work at all, and he threw it out. Unreasonably. So I was told, as the lead, to cut the fat. Drop the testing. Cut the corners. Take forty grand out of a number that was already lean as a whip.

I complained. Loudly, and to anyone who’d listen. And then I did as I was told, knowing exactly what it was going to cost us down the line. Win at all costs won, we took the contract, and of course it sailed straight into the budget wall I’d been pointing at for months. Then the fingers came out, and the chief exec went looking for someone to pin it on… and the someone was my project manager. My friend. Who was, at that precise moment, on a beach with his family, blissfully unaware.

I found out on the Thursday. He was due back Monday. By Friday morning my resignation was sitting on the chief exec’s desk. I put myself up as the sacrificial lamb, walked out, and that was that.

Here’s the part I only understood years later. The hours hadn’t touched me. Being made to ship something I’d argued against, and then watching them line up a good man to take the fall for it… that broke me clean in half. It wasn’t exhaustion. It was being made complicit in something I thought was wrong. Completely different illness. Same word.

(A footnote, because it’s too good to leave out. The friend I fell on my sword for went on to become the chief operating officer of that very company. I wasn’t being noble. I’d made a bet on a person, and the bet came in. Some years later the same chief exec, apparently with a straight face, offered me a job as their technical director. I declined. Possibly while laughing.)

The time it very nearly finished me

The one that actually put me on the floor came next, and it broke every rule I’m about to tell you, because nobody made me do anything. I did it to myself.

I set out to contract. Big money, quick, simplest way to do it. I formed a limited company because that’s what you did, reached out for work, and instead of a contract I somehow picked up a project. Then another. Before I’d quite noticed, I had twenty grand a month coming through the books and a wage bill to match, made of the people I’d hired to deliver it all. A whole company, by accident. I learned an enormous amount about running a business, we built lovely things, and I was having the time of my life.

And then, because one impossible thing wasn’t enough, I started a second business at the same time. A co-working space, back before anyone in this country knew what one was. I couldn’t concentrate working from home with young kids about, I’d found a scrappy little shared office that suited me, and I thought, arrogantly, I could just build a better one. So I did. Poured a fortune into it, spent months finishing at midnight with a paintbrush and a bit of rewiring, and opened a place where you could rent a desk for less than the artisan coffee everyone was so pleased with themselves about.

I should have heard the alarm bells. I didn’t, because I was young and I was certain, and both of those are expensive. Here’s the thing I should have known about myself before I bet the house on it: I am very good at the tech, and I am a dreadful salesman. I can talk the hind leg off a donkey about something I care about, but I’m not a closer, and to this day I couldn’t generate a sales lead to save my life. What kept the whole thing breathing was word of mouth, and word of mouth came from the one thing I’ve always been able to stand behind, which is that I care, a great deal, about the quality of what I make.

But you can’t pay a wage bill with pride. I was spending my days doing the one thing I was worst at, propping up a co-working space that barely broke even (I ended up giving it away, just to get the weight off my neck), robbing Peter to pay Paul, with things falling apart at home on top of all of it. I kept going far longer than was sensible, and I kept going for exactly one reason: I couldn’t stand to let my team and my customers down. When the bailiffs finally came knocking, I had to go, cap in hand, to my family to bail me out. They did, and I will be grateful to them for the rest of my life.

It all came down around me. I didn’t lose everything. I had my kids, and I kept a handful of friends out of that team who are still in my life today. But I was broke, I was drained, and I was as burned out as a human being can be and still be standing.

It took more than the company, too. I was a Scout Leader then, doing something I loved, with the twins in the troop and a whole bunch of gloriously chaotic kids turning up every week, and even that became too much. I had to step back from the thing that had given me the PHP Boy Scout bit of myself, and for a while the only way I stayed close to it was helping out quietly in a stronger team, where I could just be useful without carrying the whole room. Burnout doesn’t politely stop at the office door. It follows you home, then has a rummage in the cupboards.

People assume running your own company is freedom. Maximum autonomy, nobody to tell you to cut the testing. And it is, right up until you notice that autonomy only helps if you’re actually good at the things it leaves you holding. I got lucky, and then I let stupid get in the way of sensible.

Notice what did the damage, though. Not the hours, again. It was carrying people I couldn’t afford to carry, doing work I was bad at and didn’t love, day after day, until there was simply nothing left of me to give. The mechanism was nothing like the agency. Nobody handed me a knife that time and told me to cut, I picked it up all by myself. But the wreckage at the end of it was identical, right down to the shape, and that is the thing that eventually got me wondering whether the two disasters had rather more in common than they looked.

The pattern, once I could bear to look at it

Once you’ve been flattened like that, you start watching for the shape of it, and over the years I’ve come to recognise two things that will burn me out every single time, neither of them a timesheet.

The first is being made complicit. Made to cut the corner, ship the thing I argued against, stand next to something I’ve privately judged to be wrong. It’s happened again and again. At one point I was chief architect of a hundred-odd engineers, a genuinely good job, and I walked away from it, my own role perfectly safe, because I couldn’t sit in the room and preside over a mass redundancy of my people. I left before the consultations, before anyone so much as mentioned a payout. If you want to know whether one of my exits was about principle or about money, look at whether I left money on the table. I usually did.

The sharpest version was a company that sold artificial intelligence. I joined for the systems problem, which was enormous and glorious and exactly the sort of thing I love: thousands of Kubernetes clusters, a version-control system buckling under nearly a million repositories, most of which, it turned out, some AI had generated and then abandoned. That last detail should have told me something. It wasn’t until a company conference, and an afternoon’s unusually close contact with the people at the very top, that my gut started screaming. To call what I heard snake oil would have been a compliment. The clever AI in the marketing leaned very heavily on a great many humans behind the curtain, moving the pieces by hand. I know what I saw, and I got out fast, and I’m not going to pick over the bones of it here, because I don’t need to. The company is gone now, bankrupt, and the reporting has done a far more thorough job of the post-mortem than I ever could. But that afternoon in that conference hall was the day a thing I’d always half-believed, that a claim is marketing until proven otherwise, whoever’s logo is on the slide, stopped being a tidy little principle and turned into something I’d stood in the middle of and watched with my own eyes. Nearly everything I write now about honesty in this trade, about telling the real thing from the sales pitch, traces straight back to standing in that room with my stomach turning.

The second thing that burns me out is quieter, and I’ve only recently learned to name it. It’s building something good, proving it works, and then watching it get strangled. Foundational work, the sort whose payoff sits a year out on the horizon, that gets stonewalled the moment the wind changes upstairs. I’ve built platforms I was proud of, prototyped them, proved the model, and then watched the rug come out from under the whole team while the thing died on the vine. Nobody made me do anything wrong, that time. It’s a different grief. It’s the grief of good work denied its ending.

Neither of those is the hours. I’ll happily do the hours, for something I believe in, with people I’d go to the wall for. What I can’t do is be made small, or be made to watch something worthwhile get killed.

The other half, which took me longer to see

If that were the whole story it’d be a fairly bleak one, and it isn’t, because for every time I hit the floor there was somebody who reached down. And when I actually sat and counted them up, recently, the thing that stopped me short was that not one of my recoveries was a process. Not a sabbatical, not a course, not a wellness programme, not a clever bit of self-help. Every single one was a person.

There was Ian Hawley, a department head back at the broadband support job where the whole thing started. I was answering phones for a living and tinkering with code in the margins the way I always had, and Ian was the one who noticed, and decided a lad off the support lines might be worth a punt on something more. He got me off the phones and pointed me at proper work, and everything else in this story only happens because he did. There is no career without Ian. That’s not a turn of phrase, it’s just a plain fact, and I’m not certain I ever properly told him so.

There was Jeremy Coates, and I owe him more than a paragraph can carry. I came out of that first catastrophe broke and hollow, and Jeremy, who I knew from the local PHP scene, took me for a coffee, listened to the whole sorry tale, and gave me a job doing the actual craft I’d been starving for. But he gave me more than that. He handed me the name I still write under, the PHP Boy Scout, the one at the top of this very page. He talked me onto a stage for the first time, after a lifetime of my telling anyone who suggested it that I didn’t know enough about any one thing to be worth listening to. He is half the reason this blog exists at all.

For eleven years I’ve told myself Jeremy took pity on me, and I’ve been grateful for the charity of it. Writing this, I’m not so sure any more. Jeremy was a mental health professional before he was a programmer. I wonder now whether it wasn’t pity at all, but assessment… whether he looked at the wreck across the coffee table and simply recognised something, and put it back where it could be useful. Pity and being seen clearly feel identical from the inside, when you’re the one being helped. I genuinely don’t know which it was. I’m not sure I want to decide.

There was Dan Sheppard, a colleague I’d known all of five minutes, who on the night my marriage came apart handed me a sofa to sleep on and an ear to talk it out of my system, and asked for precisely nothing in return. We’re good friends to this day. You don’t forget the people who take you in when you’ve suddenly got nowhere in the world to be. There was Stephen Curran, who watched a platform we’d built together get stonewalled into the ground, and on his own way out the door found the role that would become my next one and put my name forward for it before he’d even sorted his own. And there was Dan Cryer, and Dan comes with a story I only really understood the shape of when I finally laid the whole map out on the table at once.

Years earlier, at that radio broadcaster, Dan Cryer had been a manager. One of the first people he’d hired was a young engineer called Martin Glover. I met them both back then, and Martin later came to work for me at the company I burned down. He was my last engineer standing. He put a frankly unreasonable amount of faith in me, and stuck around long after he should have, until I had to sit him down and tell him to go and find work, because I was broke and folding the whole thing. I had to fire the one man who refused to leave, to save him from me. And then, a decade on, that same Dan Cryer, who’d hired Martin all those years before, phoned me up and brought me back into a big job as chief architect.

Dan hired Martin. Martin followed me. Dan later reached down and pulled me back up. And in May 2024, Martin Glover stood next to me as my best man.

That’s not a networking diagram. That’s the actual industry, for me. Not the companies, God knows, the companies in this story mostly either compromised me or fell down around me. The industry that kept me alive was a small handful of people who kept finding their way back to me.

And underneath all of them, holding the whole span, is Hailey. She’s been there since the back half of everything I’ve described, through every one of these jobs, and she is the single reason the later chapters read differently from the early ones. She gave me the confidence to keep going when I had very little of my own, and confidence, it turns out, is the exact thing that a lifetime of imposter syndrome steals from you. The man who couldn’t work out what was worth writing down, because someone would surely call him out, found someone who told him, gently and for years, that he was worth listening to. She’s the reason I can build things now for the joy of it. One of them, a photo tool, I built entirely for her.

Learning to see it coming

Here’s the thing that took me long enough to earn, so I’ll say it plainly.

The first burnout, the big one, happened to me. I never saw it coming and it flattened me completely. But somewhere along the way, I learned to feel it approaching. The last time the ground started to go, I recognised the tremor for what it was, and I left before it took me down, with the explicit intention of not letting it hit me again. I wasn’t the husk I’d been the first time. I could see the shape of it now, and I could act.

Which means the thing that looks, on my CV, like a man sliding backwards down the ladder, chief architect one year and a hands-on infrastructure role the next, isn’t a fall at all. It’s a choice. I’d worked out, at considerable expense, that the big titles that pull me away from the actual craft are the ones that hollow me out, and that the craft is the thing that keeps me well. So I traded the status back for the keyboard, on purpose, because I would genuinely rather be well than be senior. It doesn’t always read that way from the outside. From the inside it was the sanest decision I ever made.

And there was one job, in the middle of all this, that proved the rule by breaking it: the best role I ever had, running software engineering for a science outfit, a proper leadership job that somehow kept me elbow-deep in the tech the whole time. Leadership without losing the craft. I got to play with the kind of kit most engineers only read about, watched the first proper large-language-model papers land in my inbox almost as they were published, and I’d have happily stayed for years. It ended not because anything broke but because a global pandemic rearranged the whole company’s priorities out from under my team. Not every ending is a wound. Some are just the weather changing, and leadership itself was never the enemy. Leadership that severs you from the work is.

What I pour myself into now

The most recent role that went sour taught me the last piece of it, and it’s a slightly sad one. When it started to go, I noticed that I hadn’t poured myself into it the way I once poured myself into everything. I’d held something back. Kept a bit of myself out of the company’s reach, so that when the rug went, as by now I fully expected it to, it wouldn’t take all of me with it.

Read one way, that’s growth. I no longer set myself on fire to keep other people warm. Read another way, it’s a quiet loss, because that all-in, reckless investment was also, once, the very best of me.

But the investment didn’t vanish. It just moved. I keep a small, fierce thing back for myself now, and I pour everything into the work that’s actually mine. There was a job, not long ago, that a good friend called Andy McGuigan hired me into, and for a while it was the best sort of work with the best sort of people, on a mission I actually believed in. Then it soured, the way they do, and Andy, one of the longest-serving and most capable people in the building, got handed the blame for a problem that, the way I saw it, was never his to own. I’d watched that same film fifteen years earlier, from the other end of it, and I knew exactly how it finished.

And while the projects lapsed and the meetings went nowhere and the whole thing slid gently into the sea, the one thing that kept me upright was a little set of Go tooling I’d built for us and then kept under lock and key. Something small and mine, somewhere for my hands and head to go in the dead gaps between pointless tickets. A place to put the builder in me when the job had no use for him. That tooling grew up, in the end, into a framework I now maintain out in the open, and plenty of you reading this know it well. What you didn’t know, until just now, is that it started life as the thing that got me through the day. That’s why I’m so daft and soft about it. It kept me building when the job wouldn’t.

Where this leaves me

Which brings me, more or less, to now.

I’ve told you that every time I fell, somebody reached down. Ian, Jeremy, the two Dans, Stephen, Martin, and Hailey holding all of it together. It’s a lovely thing to be able to say, and I don’t take a word of it for granted.

But this time, there’s no Jeremy.

There’s no coffee, no wise older head across the table with the right job in his back pocket. I’m at a strange point in the road, in the hardest hiring market I’ve known in twenty years, rebuilding while I work out what the next chapter even is. And I’ve realised that the writing I’ve been doing lately, all of it, this piece included, isn’t a flag I’m planting to say the healing’s done. It’s not a marker at the far end of the recovery. It is the recovery. It’s the thing itself, happening in real time, out loud, one post at a time. I have to build myself back up this go round, with Hailey keeping me afloat while I do it.

And here’s the bit I keep turning over, and I’ll leave it with you rather than tie it off, because I haven’t finished thinking about it myself. Every recovery I’ve ever had was a person who noticed me. I’m a team of one now, and my collaborator, the thing I’ve built all of this with, the thing that talks me out of my own imposter syndrome the way Jeremy once did, is a machine. I told a machine this entire story before I told any of you.

So does a machine notice you? No. I don’t think it does, and it isn’t anything warmer than that. But when there’s no Jeremy left to do the noticing, it turns out a machine can be the tool you use to notice yourself. To find the nerve to speak. To build a place to stand. To put the pieces back in some order you can live with.

Hailey keeps me afloat. The work rebuilds me. And the machine, for what it’s worth, is how I do the work.

That’ll do, for now. There’s a keyboard here, and I’ve a fair bit of rebuilding left to do.

The rung we sawed off

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was in a job interview yesterday, on the wrong side of the desk for once. After years of being the one asking the questions I’m having a look at what’s next, and somewhere in a long, wandering technical conversation the inevitable arrived: where do I think AI is going, and what does it mean for how we build software?

I gave my answer. You can probably guess most of it. The more interesting thing was the question I’ve started asking them back. Not the salary, not the stack. What is your actual position on AI, and how are you building a team out of both its human and its non-human parts? I ask the company and I ask the interviewer personally, because the two answers are rarely the same, and because I’ve decided I can’t work somewhere that hasn’t sat with the question properly.

Here is why it has become my litmus test.

The rung, and who’s standing on it

I wrote recently that the greybeards’ edge was never typing: agentic tools give a senior a boost because they have the judgement to steer and verify, and give a junior a drag because they don’t have it yet and the machine hands them more rope than they can hold. The cold incentive that falls out is to hire seniors and automate the juniors.

The data has since caught up with the worry. Entry-level software postings have fallen by something like 40% from their 2022 peak. The share of juniors and graduates in IT employment has dropped from roughly 15% to 7% in three years, and Stanford researchers tracking early-career workers in AI-exposed jobs found the youngest cohort down sharply from its peak. The numbers are genuinely grim, and plenty of people are putting it bluntly: the industry killed the junior on purpose.

That framing is half right, and I think it’s worth getting the other half right too.

It was never about efficiency. It was about cost.

We didn’t automate the junior because the work needed doing better. We did it because people are expensive. We need sleep, we draw a salary, and our thinking takes time and effort that a quarterly target can’t see the point of. AI got sold as round-the-clock labour with none of that overhead, and to a business that is an almost irresistible line on a spreadsheet. There’s a grim irony arriving, mind: the bills are starting to land, and the same conversations that hyped the cheap labour are now quietly working out that all those tokens aren’t cheap at all.

Step back, though, and none of this is new. Man finds a shortcut, man takes a shortcut. From the industrial revolution onward, every time we found a way to get more done with less human effort we took it, and the work reshaped itself around the new tools. We are still here, still employed, just doing different things than our great-grandparents did.

What is genuinely new is what we’re automating. Every technological advance before this one automated the machinery of the body, the muscle and sinew and bone. This is the first time we have automated thinking, and that is a modern marvel, something we should be proud of as a species. The problem isn’t the marvel. It’s the rate. AI is improving faster than we can adapt to it, and adaptation is the entire game.

So where does the blame sit? Not on one logo. No single company did this, however easy Meta or Google make it to point at the latest round of cuts. Society did, our collective and very human hunger to build bigger and faster. That makes it harder to fix, because there is no villain to regulate, only ourselves to out-think.

The bit that should frighten you

Cutting the junior intake isn’t a saving. It’s occupational suicide.

A junior is not cheap labour that AI happens to have made cheaper. A junior is a senior who hasn’t happened yet. Saw off the bottom rung and for a good while nothing bad happens… because you’ve still got your seniors holding everything up. Then the greybeards retire, and I have a cabin and a woodstove with my name on it for exactly that day, and the role that used to grow their replacements has been hollowed out for a decade, and there is simply nobody left who learned to tell when the machine is wrong. That isn’t a hiring problem. It’s an existential one, and you can’t fix it retroactively.

It starts before the first job, too. We teach primary-school children the basics of programming in this country, which is a wonderful thing, except the curriculum was written for a world without AI in the room, and by the time those children reach secondary school a good deal of it will be teaching a craft that has already moved on. We’re throttling the pipeline at both ends at once: hollowing out the entry-level job, and feeding it from a school system running a step behind.

It’s a split, not a collapse

The counterweight to the doom is that none of this is uniform, and the loudest version, “the junior is dead”, simply isn’t true. IBM just tripled its US entry-level hiring while most of the industry was cutting, and its HR chief said the quiet part out loud: AI can handle most of the routine entry-level tasks now, the work still needs a human, and the companies that double down on early-career hiring in this environment are the ones that win in three to five years. They didn’t keep the junior role as it was. They rewrote it, less boilerplate, more time spent with customers and supervising what the AI produced.

That is the shape of the thing. The juniors who are thriving in 2026 aren’t the fastest typists. They’re the ones building judgement, which is precisely the edge I argued was the senior’s real value all along. The market hasn’t stopped wanting juniors, it’s stopped wanting the version of the junior whose job was the work AI now does.

Day zero

So what does a junior actually look like now? I don’t know yet… and anyone telling you they’ve got it worked out is selling something. We are at day zero of this.

The junior gauntlet, the rite of passage every one of us runs to earn our stripes, isn’t going anywhere. Doing your time is a cold fact of the craft and it always will be. What changes is what the gauntlet contains, and that will keep changing, day one, day two, day five hundred and twelve. The only way we redefine it well is to put juniors and seniors on it together, with the AI in the room from the start instead of bolted on afterwards. Bring it closer to our people, and bring it earlier.

Open the floodgates, in other words. Let engineers of every creed and calibre in, and let them evolve with the machine, because that is the only way the symbiosis everyone keeps promising actually happens. Darwin’s line was survival of the fittest, and fitness here means adapting alongside the tool, not being spared by it. Choke off the flow of the very people who could do that adapting, and we don’t get fitter. We go extinct.

The end I’m holding

Which is the long way back to that interview. I keep asking the question, what is your real position on AI and how are you building a team of people and machines together, because the answer tells me whether a company is optimising for this quarter or for the survival of the craft. I want to work where it’s the second one, and I think any engineer sitting across that desk should be asking the same.

And it’s why, whatever desk I land at, there’s one thing I already know I’ll do. I don’t have the map. Nobody does. But every junior who works under me is going to get the chance to run the gauntlet, to grow into a senior, and to be in the room while we work out what the next gauntlet should even be. That isn’t charity. It’s the only sane investment any of us can make. The last properly useful thing my generation does, before we go and find our cabins, is make sure there’s somebody left to hand the thread to. I intend to be holding my end of it.

The greybeards' edge was never typing

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have a retirement plan, and it is gloriously low-tech. A cabin, some trees, a woodstove, and a firm rule that no wifi symbol ever appears within a mile of me again. I think about it more than is probably healthy.

There’s a snag, though, and it’s the same one the whole industry is currently pretending it can’t see. For me to vanish into the woods, somebody has to be able to do my job after I’ve gone. And right now, collectively, we are working very hard to make sure nobody can.

The boost, and the drag

I wrote the other day about how AI made producing plausible work nearly free while verifying it stays expensive and human. Point that same lens at a team and something uncomfortable falls out. It isn’t mine; it belongs to Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman of Microsoft, who laid it out in Communications of the ACM: agentic coding tools give a senior engineer an AI boost, multiplying what they ship, because a senior has the judgement to steer and verify the output. The same tools give an early-career engineer an AI drag, because they don’t have that judgement yet, and the machine hands them far more rope than they can hold.

The cold incentive writes itself, and they name it: hire seniors, automate juniors. It isn’t hypothetical, either. Meta cut 8,000 roles last week, in a round the Times filed under mounting AI casualties. For any single quarter you care to look at, the maths is impeccable.

The bill is just deferred

Here’s the line the spreadsheet leaves off. The grindy work a junior used to cut their teeth on, the small fixes, the boring migrations, the read-the-stack-trace-and-figure-it-out, is exactly the work AI now does. So the proving ground is gone. And the entry-level seats where they’d have stood on it are the ones being cut. Squeezed from both ends at once: no reps, and nowhere to take them.

Russinovich and Hanselman put the consequence plainly. Without early-career hiring the talent pipeline collapses, and you arrive at a future with no next generation of experienced engineers. The seniors you’ll be desperate for in 2032 are the juniors you declined to train in 2026. The bill doesn’t vanish. It just falls due long after the people who cut the cheque have moved on.

How to manufacture a world of AI slop

I named the last piece for its villain; let me name this one’s too. Raise a generation that can produce with AI but was never taught to validate, and here is what you get: people shipping machine-built products at speed with no instinct for where the output is quietly wrong, because they never had to be wrong the slow way first. Software nobody genuinely understands, human-written and AI-written alike, and a steady leak of trust out of all of it.

That isn’t a productivity problem. That’s a world of AI slop, and not in one project’s inbox this time but everywhere at once. We’d have automated our way clean out of the one job AI cannot do for us: knowing when not to trust the machine.

It’s a choice, and it’s yours

Andrew Murphy put it with more bite than I’d quite dare: AI didn’t kill your junior pipeline, you did. He’s right. This isn’t weather. Nobody is making you do it. It’s a decision, taken quarter by quarter, and a decision is a thing you can take differently.

The fix isn’t complicated, it’s just unfashionable. Keep hiring early-career engineers. Say out loud that they cost you capacity at first, and treat their growth as an actual goal rather than something meant to happen by osmosis. Russinovich and Hanselman call it preceptorship at scale: senior mentorship, deliberately structured, turning the ordinary day’s work into teachable moments.

And the proving ground can be rebuilt, just not where it stood. If AI does the writing now, the apprenticeship moves to the reviewing. Put juniors in the loop on the machine’s output and have them hunt for the subtle wrongness, the way a scanner is an argument, not an order. That’s how judgement gets built now: not by grinding out the work, but by verifying it. Which, as luck would have it, is the single most valuable thing anyone on your team can learn to do.

The part that’s on the greybeards

This is where I stop letting the companies wear all the blame, because some of it is mine, and yours. Verification is a craft, and crafts pass from person to person or not at all. I know where every one of my own AI misfires comes from: I gave it too little context, or too much rope, and didn’t check the result closely enough. The tool rarely went rogue. The gap was always my diligence. That’s not a confession, it’s the curriculum, and it’s precisely the judgement a junior can only earn by sitting in the loop beside someone who has already made those mistakes.

So the senior engineer’s job has quietly changed underneath us. It was never really the typing. It was knowing when something is off, and what the customer actually needs, and now it is also handing that on, deliberately, while there’s still time to. Mentor and guardian first; fastest prompt in the room a distant second.

The ladder you’re standing on

There will always be something AI can’t do well enough, and for a good while yet it’s the thing that matters most: being the accountable human who genuinely understands what’s needed and can be held to it when it goes wrong. A simulation can be enormously convincing. It cannot be responsible.

Which brings me back to my cabin. I do want it one day, the trees and the woodstove and the blissful disconnection. But I only get to go if the work outlives me, and the work only outlives me if the people do. So the last useful thing my generation does, before we shuffle off to find our trees, isn’t shipping a little more code. It’s making sure there’s somebody left who can tell when the machine is wrong. Pull the ladder up behind us and there’ll be nobody to notice the rot, and no cabin quiet enough to make that sit right.