June 09, 2026
Guy Coleman
Read Time: ~14 minutes
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AI is quietly turning some engineering managers into NPCs: useful, always available, and out of the plot the moment a real decision is needed. AI doesn't make EMs less necessary, it makes weak technical judgment more expensive. The surviving EM is an engineer who manages the socio-technical system, contributes for leverage, and owns the technical strategy no IC or agent can.
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/3xibjreBGlcKvul7BAC8KU?si=viimpggESumcaXAbGxWn-w
AI will not kill engineering managers. It will turn the weak ones into NPCs, the non-player characters in a video game who stand at their marker, repeat a scripted line, and never change the plot.
Plenty of EMs are already halfway there.
An NPC is useful. It greets you at standup, hands out the same quest every Monday, delivers its scripted line at planning, and is always exactly where you left it. It also decides nothing, the story happens around it. Swap "player" for "engineer" and that is a weak EM in the AI era: people-shaped, always available, permanently out of the plot.
A low-technical-context EM can look useful in a slow organisation because the job fills with coordination residue: dashboards, status rituals, ticket archaeology, calendar Tetris, summaries, follow-ups, and asking for ETAs in three different Slack channels. Some of that work matters.
But AI is coming for the residue.
It can summarise meetings. It can track actions. It can draft status updates. It can produce project plans. It can answer basic process questions. It can nag people. It can create dashboards. It can generate the weekly update that says we are tracking green.
In other words: an agent now runs your dialogue tree better than you do. More uptime, fewer 1:1s, no PTO.
None of that is here to help you scale. It is here to expose that you drifted too far from the work. That is why the NPC line stings: the NPC is useful right up until someone needs a decision, and it has no say in where the story goes. Plenty of managers have accidentally trained their organisations to treat them exactly that way: a fixture you walk up to for a status update, not someone who changes the plot.
Here is the uncomfortable bit: AI makes code cheaper, which makes weak technical judgment more expensive. The EM who survives is the one who can do what an NPC cannot: apply grounded technical judgment inside a messy human system, and use that judgment to place long-term bets the rest of the system is not equipped to place.
So here is the question every engineering manager should be asking themselves: