Your AI Strategy Is a Memo. Their AI Strategy Is Shipping.
Your 10x Engineers in AI Era
Here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Your “AI strategy” is probably a document in Confluence.
Meanwhile, two desks over, someone just shipped a feature between coffee sips, wrote tests over lunch, and pushed a rollback plan before dessert—because they quietly taught three LLMs to pair-program, lint, review, and watch dashboards while they sleep.
You’re drafting policies.
They’re drafting reality.
This is the moment of the 10x engineer—and it may only last a few more months. Not because the talent disappears, but because their edge becomes normal. The cheat codes leak. The rest of the org catches up (if not, your competitors will do that for sure).
Until then? These people are your unfair advantage—if you don’t smother them with your old policies.
The Fear Is Real. The Bigger Risk Is Doing Nothing.
Yes, you should worry about data leakage, surprise cloud bills, and “creative” interpretations of your SDLC. Anarchy scales badly.
But you should worry more about this: a competitor who standardized what you forbade, learned from the chaos, and now ships twice as fast with half the drama.
Leadership here isn’t about saying yes to everything.
It’s about carving out safe arenas where the right people can go unreasonably far, unreasonably fast—and bring back the playbook.
Five People You Should Stop Slowing Down in the AI Adoption Race
Here are the real-people personas I met over the last few months. Each went outside of their companies’ AI strategies. Each seems to be moving way faster than any other engineer in their orgs.
1) The Knowledgeable Architect
They’ve always had sharp instincts about architecture, testing, and documentation. The difference now is leverage.
Before, they needed six meetings to “evangelize” good practices. Today, they feed those practices into an LLM and refactor a service by afternoon—turning standards into scaffolding: docs that write themselves, test suites that appear where there were none, diagrams that stay in sync, coding standards being met.
Question to sit with: If your most senior builders can rewrite a subsystem in days using codified patterns, do you still need committees to “align” on what good looks like—or do you need a better way to capture and reuse what they just did?
Profile: your seasoned engineer/architect who’s been right about boring things for years.
Superpower: translates living standards into prompts, scaffolds, and guardrails that LLMs obey.
2) The Smart, Lazily-Brilliant Automator
They automate anything that smells repetitive. Not because they’re lazy, but because they refuse to live the same day twice.
LLMs now make micro-automation worth it: glue scripts appear in minutes, CI checks multiply like mushrooms, review bots write the first draft of feedback.
Question to sit with: If a teammate can shave 40 seconds off a task that runs 200 times a day, do you want them filing a ticket for a “platform improvement” or just doing it?
Profile: the person who refuses to do the same thing twice.
Superpower: turns 90-minute chores into 90-second scripts, generated by AI and ruthlessly iterated.
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