The hiring system you grew up in is broken. Here is what to stop doing · and where to climb to.
AI made shipping cheap. Reasoning got expensive.
The work you did 18 months ago is now an agent task. A coding agent will ship the feature you spec, faster than you would have. That is real. That is happening today.
What AI cannot do · decide what to build, name the tradeoff, own the call when it goes wrong. That layer is now the only layer worth paying for. Founders are not hiring shippers. They are hiring deciders.
Executes the spec. Ships what was specified, the way it was specified.
Agents do this now. Cursor + Claude Code + Devin write specs into code without you.
Writes · statuses, standups, ticket updates
Asks the right questions before writing the code. Names what the spec missed.
Agents do most of this. They surface edge cases and write the design doc draft.
Writes · designs, RFCs, the unknowns
Finds the problem worth solving. Makes the call between X and Y, and lives with the tradeoff.
Agents help here but cannot decide. The tradeoff is yours.
Writes · decisions, tradeoffs, the WHY
Interrogates their own thinking. Owns the outcome before anyone tells them to.
Agents are tools at this level. You direct them. They do not direct you.
Writes · theses, the WHY behind every move, the second line on Stuck
Most engineers under 5 years are at Stage 01 or 02 today · which is exactly where AI is the most aggressive. Good news · you do not need a new degree to climb. You need a different practice. See below.
Everyone can write a resume. AI writes one in a minute. AI reads it in less. Everything else is noise · these seven behaviours keep you stuck in the bot vs bot loop.
AI screens it before any human reads it. You get a score you cannot dispute. You never hear back.
Founders read it as "I have not decided what I want." Name the kind of problem you want to solve next.
"Skilled in GCP, Python, BigQuery" tells a founder nothing about how you think. They can find a thousand resumes with the same list.
The volume is the tell. Founders know which engineers spray applications. They skip them.
Show one example of a call you got wrong and updated on. That IS coachability. Naming it is not.
It is a wall of titles. It does not show how you decide. Founders skim it and move on.
The answer is always no, even when it should be yes. Founders are protective of their inbox.
First three are free · no signup. The fourth is where you start being read.
Five questions. See which rung of the ladder you are on today. No signup.
Start the quiz →See how Stage 3 and Stage 4 engineers actually write the WHY. RK has curated 25+ logs that founders are reading right now.
Read what got read →Five verbs · one per day · five minutes of writing each day. The verbs that climb the ladder. Read first, then write.
Open the guide →One short paragraph. One decision you made this week and the WHY behind it. Founders + ZMT Aware companies read async; they reach out when they are hiring.
Sign in and write →The place I built for engineers to write the WHY where founders read async is Proof. I read every engineer who writes.
— RK