Engineering Leader: AI Got Me Coding Again — I Built Our Feature-Flag System With an Agent
rseroter · x · 2026-10-16
Engineering leader Bjorn Roche writes on how AI changed his leadership role — less than it changed his reports' day-to-day, but profoundly.
- Hands-on renewed: he used to argue leaders beyond a certain team size should maximize managing over IC work; AI gave him renewed appreciation for staying hands-on.
- Concrete case: after a broken feature took too long to revert, he used an agent to research and build a simple in-house feature-flagging system in a few hours — no third-party dashboard, controlled via CLI args with docs written so Claude could understand them. The team adopted it immediately for all critical deployments.
- Takeaway: occasional coding by managers solves real problems and quickly improved deploy quality across teams while reducing risk.
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