Long live the engineering manager

Liz de Moll, an engineering manager at Auth0, says AI can take over status updates, but coaching and aligning teams still need a manager as code gets faster.

De Moll answers a run of articles claiming that AI and flatter organisations make engineering managers unnecessary. She draws on two parental leaves, during which her well-run teams kept working but alignment slipped and engineers took on coordination work.

• Status updates and progress tracking are work AI should take over, and in her view managers should never have carried it.
• While she was away, expectations blurred, engineers were pulled out of the code into coordination, and senior leaders were drawn into execution details.
• Code generation has sped up, but product decisions, architecture, testing, security and rollout have not, so misalignment costs more and there is less time to fix it.
• She coaches senior engineers through the change from writing every line to answering for what is produced with AI assistance.

An engineering organisation that removes managers should name who will coach engineers and translate strategy between dependent teams; this is an inference and is not the author's claim. The evidence is the author's own experience, and LeadDev asks readers to register after a few free articles.

Derived by Working Surface from the article; more in the Playbook. Source line: Removing hierarchy doesn’t remove dependencies. It just removes the people whose job it is to manage them.

20 October 2026: as AI agents make code fast to write, the scarce work moves to human judgement about what to build, what to leave out, whether the work is right, and how teams stay aligned.