Senior engineer Jamie Hurst reveals how AI has fundamentally reshaped the development workflow over three years. The traditional path from idea to implementation has collapsed, allowing proposals and working prototypes to be developed together in weeks rather than months. This acceleration has changed how technical concepts are demonstrated and approved within organizations.

Senior engineers have been impacted differently than expected, gaining both more hands-on coding responsibilities and increased strategic vision work. While building things has become faster, organizational alignment has become more challenging. The bottleneck has shifted from engineering to coordination as multiple teams can now build solutions quickly, making cohesion harder to achieve.

The expanded role comes at a cost, with mentoring and thinking time being squeezed out. Hurst questions whether this pace is sustainable, noting that expectations have risen faster than productivity gains. The human-focused work that can't be accelerated by AI tools remains disproportionately expensive and vulnerable to being cut.