A foreman seen from behind, the back of the head showing, takes down half the job tickets pinned to a crowded board in a workshop, while three small robots at their workbenches each juggle several half-finished parts and a fresh stack of tickets waits on a table by the door, the whole scene drawn with wide empty margins on every side.

Codacy

How AI Is Changing the Engineering Manager Role: More Context, More Capacity, and the New Job of Protecting Focus

Codacy with Alejandro Rizzo and Jorge Braz · 25 September 2026

Takeaway

Two engineering managers at Codacy, a maker of code-quality tools, say AI tools let each engineer start several tasks at once, so they now limit how much work is open.

Summary

Codacy, a company that sells code-quality and code-review tools, asked two of its engineering managers, Alejandro Rizzo and Jorge Braz, how AI tools have changed their jobs. Braz reports that each engineer can now build one feature while planning the next, so a squad of three or four people juggles up to six topics. Both managers say their job has moved towards protecting the team's focus and the quality of its code.

Key points

Braz, who manages the squads responsible for platform reliability, does not write production code. He says AI tools now give a quick picture of a system that once took hours of reading code.
Rizzo actively limits the number of topics each person and each squad has open. He finds that stakeholders and the engineers' own curiosity push for more work in roughly equal measure.
Both managers hold code written by AI tools to stricter standards for tests and complexity than hand-written code, and enforce them with Codacy's own product.
Braz argues that AI adds speed, and that the cost falls on quality or scope unless a team decides which to protect. His reliability squads protect quality.

Implication

An engineering manager whose team uses AI tools may need to decide what not to start, as these managers do, and to set a limit on open work. The piece is Codacy's own account of its staff, and it closes with a pitch for Codacy's products.

Suggested actions

Engineering

Cap how many topics each engineer and each squad may have open at once, and hold the cap when stakeholders or engineers push to start more AI-assisted work.

Engineering

Set stricter automated checks for test coverage and code complexity on AI-written code than on hand-written code, and run them on every change before merging.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: Alejandro described actively working to limit the number of topics running per person and per squad, staying vigilant about it because the pressure to expand comes from stakeholders and from the engineers' own curiosity in roughly equal measure.

Source issue

25 September 2026: the defaults, the rejected options and the material an AI can reach decide results before anyone chooses.