Ten minutes into the call, I ended it.
Not because the candidate was rude. Not because they couldn’t answer the questions. But because they told me something I hadn’t heard in months of interviews, and it made further conversation pointless.
I’d asked about their AI usage in engineering.
They said they used Cursor — but only the autocomplete feature. Deliberately. Not because they hadn’t tried the rest.
“I restrain myself from using agents,” they said. “It keeps my coding literacy intact.”
The honesty was striking. This wasn’t someone who hadn’t heard of AI agents. They had. They’d tried them. And they’d made a conscious decision to pull back.
I didn’t pretend to agree. I told them directly: from Ara Pay’s perspective, the path of manually writing every line of code is over. We don’t hire engineers who aren’t AI-native. One engineer with AI does the work of a team.
We ended the call with mutual respect and complete incompatibility.
What I’ve been sitting with since: neither of us was wrong.
They were protecting something real — the instinct that genuine skill atrophies when you outsource the thinking. That’s not paranoia. That’s what craftspeople have always known.
And I’m betting on something real too — that the leverage from AI-native engineering is large enough to change what “skilled” even means. That the skill is increasingly in knowing when and how to use the tool, not in doing what the tool can do.
Two people. Two bets on different versions of the future.
What struck me was how rarely that kind of clear-eyed incompatibility gets named out loud. Most interviews where the fit isn’t there end in vague goodbyes. This one ended cleanly, because both of us said what we actually believed.
I think there’s more of this to come. As AI becomes more integrated into engineering, the gap between people who use it natively and people who use it cautiously will keep widening. Eventually those two groups won’t be competing for the same roles.
How are you seeing this split play out in your own teams — and do you think one side is making the right bet?
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