1. Shift from Speed to Quality
While different engineering levels can build the same features using AI, a senior engineer is distinguished by higher quality, fewer bugs, and fewer tokens spent in their first version.
Hear it at 0:00 →Engineering video
2:02 · 5 October 2026
What Makes You a Senior Engineer in the AI Era
Key concepts in this video:
2. Understanding the Software Factory
Senior engineers focus on the system that produces software—such as setting up agent markdown files, skills, models, and system stability—rather than just the features themselves.
Hear it at 1:00 →Transcript
So, one of the biggest difference between all those levels is that with AI, they could all build the same feature. But the way you can tell if someone is a CEO or not, it's by the quality they get in their first version. What we are seeing is a lot of applications are just getting slop. There's a lot of production bugs, there's a lot of incidents. Because people don't think too much about what they're doing.
They don't think about the consequences, or they don't have the experience to own the surface they they have. So, we are passing this depth to the consumer, we are passing the box to the user. And you can see big applications are breaking. And so the difference today is not anymore the speed. Back in the days, you are senior if you could deliver faster, and the reason why you could as a senior engineer own and to end features is because you're reasonably faster across all the stack.
Where is the mid level, it take them ages. So now, the difference is quality. Whereas a senior could get the same feature live, they would spend less tokens, and there will be less production defects, there will be less bugs, basically. The other difference is that the senior can understand the software factory we are building. Not only the feature that comes out, but also how should we set up our agent MD, our skills, what models should we use, how do we make the system more stable?
So, they talk more about the not only the car, but the factory that produces the car. Uh, now, a lot of people are talking about software factories, I saw other people comparing it with a kitchen. Because software it's a design process, we are not turning out the same car all the time. So, this whole comparison with the factory is not direct. People are trying to build a structure, but the software needs to be a lot more mobile.
Anyways, all this is to say that the senior full-stack engineer would probably be the person that delivers across the stack with AI with the highest quality in the least amount of iterations. And I'll see they don't only deliver software, but they make the system that delivers software, the teams, the AI, the code base, the hardness that the models are working around them better, right? And that's a totally new dimension.
for a senior engineer.