I want more Ofirs on my team. And not because he's the fastest developer, but because of something that in my eyes has become the most important trait for an em
Machine translation from the original post. Not reviewed by a human translator. Historical claims may no longer be current.
I want more Ofirs on my team. And not because he's the fastest developer, but because of something that in my eyes has become the most important trait for an employee in the AI era. And what do you think is the most important trait in employees in today's POST-AI era?
I think the answer has narrowed down to one thing: thinking outside the box.
I reached this insight following a hallway conversation with Ofir Cohen, who managed to surprise me with the agent he built that automatically performs a number of actions that we do manually.
When I describe it like that it sounds trivial, right?
After all, that's roughly what everyone is doing now
Well, it's not that trivial - to look at what everyone has already gotten used to and ask why it's done that way at all, to identify the details nobody else notices, to constantly challenge basic assumptions, and then also know how to take that idea, wire it into the system and make it really work.
This combination of creativity, critical thinking and deep technical understanding is in my eyes the most important ability of a developer in the AI era.
What's called continuous challenging yourself
Want to hear what we actually did?
I thought I had already done quite a few automations for us to improve the Developer Experience, skills and commands that already automate things like opening a PR, self review, fixing conflicts from master, going through review comments and fixing (or suggesting a fix), and as far as I was concerned we had reached a high degree of optimization in automating the processes we do on an ongoing basis.
And then Ofir the cannon came along and took it a step forward - instead of us running these commands when we come back to work on a task, he set up a Routine in Claude Code that goes over all the open PRs several times a day and performs a few actions that I thought I had already automated myself but I was still running manually - if the CI fails it fixes it, if there are comments it goes over them and submits them to me with proposed solutions, if there's a conflict with master it rebases and fixes merge conflicts, and in short a minion that makes sure my open PR is always up to date and hands it to me chewed and as ready as possible.
You could call it a smart implementation of the concept of Loop engineering
And that's just one small example from this week in the team. There are so many examples of clever solutions happening here on a daily basis by the whole team that the space is too short to contain them.
If the whole team is made up of people who think outside the box and the system encourages it, then in a period like this, where the ability to turn thoughts into output has become a no brainer, the rate of development that can be reached is exponential, especially when you harness autonomous AI agents to push the system forward.
After all, we are in a new era in which the meaning of leading development alone and without help has been lost. We work alongside artificial minds that are experts in code, and this delegation of coding creates a situation of pair programming between human and machine and leaves us with very particular traits, more about leading context and dictating the creation.
In my view there's no longer a difference between a developer who can recite leet code answers and a developer who knows how to ask the agent for the answer. If the question you ask (or are asked) in an interview can be solved by a single prompt, then the question is redundant. Whether it's a code question, whether it's architecture, and whether it's other roles in the organization like a managerial or operational role.
And we are indeed in a transition period so I assume there are still companies that continue asking the same questions and using the same methods to interview as before the AI era because this era has only just begun, but that's temporary.
A good time for creative people who think outside the box
And maybe we're all like that and only now has the fertile ground been created to bring our creativity to expression?