Engineering Leader Interviews (biweekly)

The agentic transition in engineering is not just a technology story. It is a leadership story. Behind every team that has successfully integrated coding agents is a leader who made decisions about team structure, process changes, oversight practices, and cultural adaptation — often without a playbook.

The Engineering Leader Interviews series captures those decisions. Every two weeks, we sit down with a CTO, VP of Engineering, or engineering director to discuss how they are navigating the shift to a mixed human-agent workforce. No slides. No product pitches. Just a candid Q&A about what they tried, what worked, what did not, and what they wish they had known earlier.

Why these conversations matter

The technical details of coding agents are well-documented. What is not well-documented is the leadership dimension: how do you restructure teams when agents handle a growing share of implementation? How do you maintain culture when part of your “team” is non-human? How do you set expectations for code review when agent output doubles the review queue overnight?

These are questions that only leaders who have been through the experience can answer with credibility. Conference talks are too polished. Blog posts are too curated. What leaders need is the unedited version — the mistakes, the surprises, the things that looked obvious in retrospect but were not at the time.

The format

Each interview follows a consistent structure with room for the conversation to go wherever it is most valuable.

Opening context (2 minutes): Company stage, team size, when they started using agents, and their current level of integration.

The adoption story (10 minutes): How agents entered the workflow. Was it top-down or bottom-up? What was the first use case? What resistance did they encounter? How did they handle it?

Process changes (10 minutes): What changed in their development process — standup format, code review practices, task assignment, planning cadences. What stayed the same?

Visibility and oversight (10 minutes): How they track agent output, maintain quality, and keep leadership informed about what both humans and agents are producing.

Mistakes and lessons (5 minutes): The things they got wrong early and what they would do differently.

Advice (3 minutes): What they would tell a peer who is just starting the agentic transition.

Recurring themes

After initial conversations with leaders in our network, several themes have emerged that we expect to recur throughout the series.

”We underestimated the visibility challenge”

Nearly every leader reports that agent adoption was faster than expected, but visibility infrastructure lagged behind. Teams started using agents enthusiastically, and within weeks, managers realized they could not tell how much of the team’s output was human versus agent, or whether agent output was getting the same review rigor.

”The org chart conversation is coming”

Several leaders are grappling with what agent productivity means for team sizing. If three developers with agents can produce what five developers produced before, what does that mean for hiring plans? Nobody has a clean answer yet, but the conversation is happening at the leadership level.

”Culture is the sleeper issue”

Technical integration is the easy part. The cultural shift — helping developers feel valued when agents handle work they used to own, building trust in agent output, creating norms for human-agent collaboration — is harder and takes longer.

”Async became non-negotiable”

Leaders who adopted agents seriously found that synchronous ceremonies could not keep up. Agents work 24/7; standups happen once a day. The mismatch forced a shift toward async workflows, which most leaders say was overdue anyway.

Pilot interview: navigating agents at a Series B startup

To set the tone for the series, here is a condensed version of our first conversation — with a VP of Engineering at a 45-person Series B company building developer tools.

On adoption: “We did not have a formal rollout. Two senior engineers started using Cursor and Claude Code on their own. Within a month, the whole team was using agents for at least some tasks. The adoption was bottom-up and organic.”

On process changes: “The biggest change was code review. Agent-generated PRs looked different — they were often larger, more uniform, and sometimes missed the design intent behind a task. We added a label for agent-generated PRs so reviewers knew to check for intent alignment, not just correctness.”

On visibility: “This was our blind spot. For the first two months, I genuinely did not know how much of our output was agent-generated. We were shipping faster, but I could not tell whether that was sustainable or whether we were accumulating tech debt from unreviewed agent work. That is when we brought in Dailybot to unify human and agent reporting.”

On mistakes: “We should have updated our review standards before adoption scaled. We also should have had a conversation about what agents mean for career development. Junior developers were worried that agents would eliminate the tasks they learn from. That fear was real and we addressed it too late.”

On advice: “Start with visibility. Before you encourage agent adoption, make sure you have a way to see what agents are producing. If you cannot see it, you cannot manage it. And talk to your team about what agents mean for their roles — do not let them fill in the blanks with anxiety.”

How to participate

We are actively looking for engineering leaders who are willing to share their experience with the agentic transition. If you are a CTO, VP of Engineering, or engineering director who has navigated agent adoption and has lessons to share, we would love to feature your story.

The interviews are published biweekly, lightly edited for clarity, and shared with attribution (or anonymized, by preference). The goal is to build a shared knowledge base of leadership experience that benefits the entire engineering community.

The agentic transition does not come with a manual. These conversations are the closest thing we have.