Every team had one: the engineer who missed meetings, answered Slack when they felt like it, and audibly sighed when you asked them to write something down. Nobody wanted to work with them. Everybody had to, because they were the only person alive who understood that legacy scala system, or the deploy pipeline, or the one service with no tests that everything else depended on.
So we dealt with it. The work always showed up. Maybe not on time, but it showed up, it worked, and perhaps no one else could have done it. That was the deal: you get to be difficult because what you know is scarce.
That deal is over.
The work isn’t scarce anymore
Anybody with an agent and a little patience can sit down with a codebase they have never seen and reason about it. I don’t mean throw a prompt at it blindly and hope. I mean actually work through it, in collaboration with the thing: what does this do? why was it built this way? what breaks if we change it? You can understand the tradeoffs in a system in an afternoon that used to take a new hire six months of pairing with the one person who knew.
And the code that comes out the other end is good. A year and a half ago I wrote that Claude kind of sucks. Nine months later I wrote that it’s kind of good. Today, with a model like Fable, I’ll say this: when I hand it the real constraints of a system I already know well, the design it comes back with is usually better than what we shipped, and what we shipped was built by people I respect. That isn’t a knock on them. The model has seen more systems like ours than any of us ever will, and it starts from the best of them. That’s where the capability is today, and look at the slope. What it still can’t do is know the constraints in the first place: who this is for, what it’s allowed to break, what happened the last time we tried. That part is a person.
So the thing that made the difficult engineer worth it, the scarce technical capability, isn’t scarce. And here’s the part I think people are missing: AI didn’t just make the work cheap. It made the person visible. When everybody can produce the work, the only thing left to look at is everything we used to put up with in order to get the work. The output used to hide the person. Now the output is table stakes, and the person is standing right there.
What’s scarce now is judgment
If the work is a commodity, what isn’t?
Judgment. Knowing the difference between throwing an agent at a problem and asking it the right questions. Have we considered that this application is going to get pen tested and served to millions of people? Did we think about load? Did we think about security? What does this do to the database? What are the edge cases? Is anyone actually reviewing the tests, or are we just happy they’re green? And, most importantly: how can this impact our users?
The agent will happily build whatever you describe. Whether you described the right thing is on you.
That’s the engineering half. The other half is the human half, and I’d argue it matters more now than the engineering does.
Can I trust what you tell me?
It still comes back to judgment, just pointed at the person instead of the code. When I work with somebody, this is what I’m actually evaluating, whether I say it out loud or not:
- Is what they tell me accurate? When they talk, are they usually right?
- How fast can I expect a response?
- When it comes, is it obvious they thought about the question, the implications of the question, and how it fits into the bigger picture? Did they go past what I asked and look at the stuff around it? Did they do the work?
- Are they easy to work with? Are they friendly? (Yes, that counts)
The third one is where it’s falling apart for a lot of people right now.
The meat proxy
The worst thing you can do in 2026 is take a question somebody asked you, paste it into an AI, and paste the answer back.
It is the laziest move available, it’s annoying, and it wastes everybody’s time, because I can do that. I have the same tools you do. It should be obvious, assumed even, that before I came to you I already asked the AI – or there’s a reason I didn’t. Five years ago you were expected to Google a question before you asked a coworker. This is the same bar, and it’s a low one. Looking dumb, asking a question, saying “I don’t know”: all still fine. That’s not what we’re talking about here. A question that starts with “I tried X and thought of Y, but I still don’t know” is great. The one where you spent zero seconds of your own before spending twenty minutes of mine – not so great.
So no, I’m not saying don’t use AI. I know you’re going to use AI and that’s fine. I’m saying the reason I asked you is that you have something my agent doesn’t: some context, some information, some expertise, some consideration that isn’t available to it. There is a reason I’m asking you, and you have to know what that reason is.
Some people don’t even try to hide it. They’ll send the whole thing back in raw LLM markdown, headers and bullets and bold and all. Some will actually write “Claude thinks X.” I don’t care what Claude thinks. I care what Brian thinks. That’s why I asked Brian.
Being easy to work with in 2026 mostly comes down to this. I know you’re using AI. Are you competent at pulling the correct, valuable part out of what it gives you and throwing away the noise, so that what reaches me is the thing I actually wanted? And can I do that for you in return? If that isn’t happening in both directions, you’re a meat proxy. And a meat proxy is worse than no proxy, because it’s slower and less valuable than going to the agent in the first place, even when the agent’s answer is half assed or partly made up. I’d rather have the wrong answer in ten seconds and know it came from a machine than get the same answer four hours later wearing your name.
Generation is free. Attention is not.
Which brings me to the three page document.
Nothing turns me off faster than being told to go read somebody’s three page slop doc and then form an opinion on it, or make a decision, or “give feedback” 🙄. Get to the point. Tell me what the important things are, and then I’ll go do the research. Linking your sources inline so I can dig deeper where I care to? Great, that helps. Frontloading me with all of it? No.
The economics of reading and writing have flipped and most people haven’t adjusted. Writing three pages used to cost the writer more than reading three pages cost the reader, so a long document was at least proof that somebody had done some work. Now writing three pages costs nothing. Reading them costs exactly what it always did. So when you hand me an uncompressed AI doc, you’re not sharing work with me. You’re transferring it. You could have spent ten minutes cutting it down. You decided to spend thirty of mine instead.
There’s an old line, usually pinned on Pascal, apologizing for a long letter because there wasn’t time to write a short one. He understood that the short one was the work.
And I’m one person. If ten people do that to me in a day, that’s thirty pages of slop across ten different contexts that I have to load into my head, put down, come back to, and try to make decisions across. It’s a brain clog. It’s a human context taker, and unlike the agent I can’t start a fresh session.
It’s rude. Honestly. It’s a demand for somebody’s time that you didn’t bother to spend yourself.
Do you actually get stuff done?
After competent and easy to work with, the third thing: does the work happen.
When I hand you something, can I expect a “got it” and then a result in a reasonable amount of time? I understand people have different ideas of how long things take. But be honest about what most of this work is. We’re not distilling a new compound or splitting atoms. It’s usually a solved problem that somebody needs to go do, and the tooling for solved problems has never been better. If it turns out to genuinely not be a solved problem? Great! That happens. Communicate.
What you can’t do anymore is disappear into the abyss until you’re pinged. If you’re assigned something, follow up the minute you’re blocked or the minute you’re done. Those are the two events. There is no third state where you’re quietly stuck for a week and I find out on Friday. There’s no reason for that anymore. There really isn’t.
Nobody has time to do your job for you
Some folks want you to scope and design how they’re going to do their own work. They want the design, the implementation steps, a whole thesis on how it should be done and why, before they’ll touch it. No, man. It’s a task. Go do it. If the ambiguity is about what the desired outcome is, ask that question – a good lead should make this obvious in the ask IMO.
Engineers used to get away with this. You could keep a non technical PM, or even an engineering manager, in a loop where the scope wasn’t quite defined, or the requirements weren’t quite clear, and you could play that game forever. Work got put off for months because there was no plan, and making the plan wasn’t your job: “My job is to write code and solve the problem. Your job is to define the problem.”
I don’t think it’s that anymore. Ambiguity used to be a legitimate reason to stop. Now there’s something sitting next to you that will help you resolve the ambiguity in twenty minutes, so if you stopped, you chose to. People need to have more agency over the quality of their own work, over themselves, and over what it means to bring your skill and whole self to a job.
Bring test results, not theories
I’m not telling you to be a wizard and make magic happen. I’m telling you to communicate.
Come back and say “I tried x, which made me think of y, here’s why it doesn’t work under our system, or our spec, or our constraints. Here’s unexepected impact we didn’t think about. Here are our options” That’s useful. Now we can talk about it. What isn’t useful is theorizing about every. Little. Detail. Do you have test results or not? And if you do, what did they teach you about the problem? Did the thing that failed point you at a different approach? Did you try that one? Linus said talk is cheap, show me the code. The 2026 version is: show me what happened when you tried, and tell me what you think we should do about it.
You used to be able to say “I tried it and it didn’t work” and hand the problem back. Now it’s on the other person to look at it, think about it, and solve it. That can’t fly anymore. There’s too much available to every single person in an organization for “it didn’t work” to be a complete sentence. At this point, not taking the next step yourself is either laziness or incompetence, and realistically it isn’t even a lot of work. It’s reading and typing. It’s talking. You sit there, feed the agent the context, and have the conversation. The solution will come, or at least a useful question to ask a person. You just have to take the time.
The soft skills were never soft
Being accurate. Being reachable. Getting to the point. Knowing why somebody asked you and not a machine. Owning a task from “got it” to done. Coming back with evidence instead of theories. None of this is new. We called them soft skills because they were the ones you could get away without, if what you knew was rare enough.
It isn’t rare anymore. The work gets done now, by everybody, all the time. The quirky, offputting, brilliant “10x engineer” is way less valuable. The thing we were paying for is on tap. The thing we were tolerating is all that’s left.
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