[matrixgard]

The skepticism-to-flow pattern you described is something that plays out almost identically across teams — the engineers who resist AI longest are usually the ones who are best at their craft and most aware of where the output is wrong. The flip happens when they stop treating it like a search engine and start treating it like a junior dev they have to review.

The productivity difference between teams who hit that click and those who don't is getting wide enough that it's becoming a hiring signal in both directions. The founders I see getting the most out of it are the ones who understand this enough to ask good questions of their team, even if they can't read the code.

What was the biggest surprise for you watching the experiment — was it which engineers clicked fastest, or something else?

[smartworkflow]

Thanks for the comment! I think the most surprising thing was how the engineers almost pushed each other to use the agent "better" - write clearer and more defined prompts engineer-style as opposed to open and generic instructions that I might use as a non-engineer. To be the architect and the staff manager of the code.

I loved seeing how they were trying to outdo each other when tasked to build something that they hadn't tried before due to their limited experience with unknown libraries. Was really fun to watch - one guy built a tool to tell users how faraway starts were relative to each other and us, one built a travel diary...I guess seeing them go from "meh" to being engaged and having fun was really cool to see!