For the past year, I've heard endless takes about how "engineers are dead" because of AI. But from where I'm sitting, building Char day and night, the real bottleneck has shifted. It's the business generalists who are struggling.
Our team has been running full-speed with AI in our development workflow. Devin, Cursor, Zed, Claude Code, Warp, GitButler — we use all of them, sometimes at the same time. Our commits per hour exploded. Hiring more engineers stopped making sense. The velocity just isn't the bottleneck anymore.
Once you embrace AI deeply, the limiting factors become taste — design taste, product taste, code review taste. Someone who can't contribute meaningfully to those areas slows things down. Negative velocity is real.
Engineers who lean into AI become unstoppable. They write more. Ship more. Break fewer things. Learn absurdly fast. Their growth has no ceiling. Only how quickly they can refine judgment matters.
Business generalists face a different problem. Everything they trade on — emailing, researching, organizing, coordinating — gets automated. Most of it is handled instantly. Their leverage is flattening.
If you can't build, can't design, can't review technical work, and can't wield AI like a power tool, you're getting replaced by people who can.
Builders win. AI-augmented builders win harder.
Why I'm Writing This Series
I want to document how we actually work at Char — not the polished PR version, but the real workflows that help a tiny team ship like a much larger one.
We don't add AI to our stack. We build with AI as the default. Char sits at the center of that. Every conversation becomes captured locally. Every decision becomes context we can revisit. Every idea gets distilled and carried forward. AI creates output fast, but Char gives it memory and direction.
This series shares that openly — the good parts, the messy parts, the stuff I wish someone told me a year ago.
If you've ever wondered how small teams can now outperform big ones, this series is us opening our playbook.
What's Coming Next
In the next post, I'll break down our full engineering stack — Devin → Cursor → Zed → Char → GitButler — and how each piece fits into a single loop, with actual examples from how we ship features every day.
After that, we'll cover:
- how we do AI-assisted code reviews
- how we use Char as our shared company memory
- how our design cycles got 5× faster
- why small, sharp teams are the new superpower
This will be a living, honest series. No hype, just how we actually operate.
A Small Personal Note
I'm writing this because I want more teams — especially small ones — to feel this kind of momentum. AI didn't remove the need to think. It removed the need to drown. Now the real differentiator is clarity, taste, and courage.
If that resonates with you, stick around. And if you want a tool that keeps your team's thinking sharp and your conversations durable, give Char a try. It's how we work every single day.
