Software Engineers Have Been Doing Two Jobs — with Nicky Pike, Coder

If AI is better than your developers, why are your best engineers still writing code?

Software engineering is the only engineering discipline where we make the engineer also turn the wrenches. Nicky Pike, Field CTO at Coder, argues that AI is finally letting your best engineers become architects while agents do the mechanic work — and lays out exactly what has to change about how you hire, govern, and provision your teams to make it real.

Nicky brings 20+ years in developer infrastructure — Xbox Live, private cloud at CVS Health, Cloud Foundry at VMware/Pivotal, and now the "first mile" problem at Coder. He's a self-described "platform guy, not a developer" who's watched this pattern play out through four platform shifts and sees the same arc happening faster.

What you'll learn:

• Why the developer laptop is the worst possible endpoint for running AI agents
• The identity split that fixes "AI slop" overnight — human vs. agent permissions
• Why Uber blew through their entire AI budget in four months (and how to avoid it)
• How the software bottleneck moved from the inner loop to the outer loop, and why GitHub can't keep up
• What to actually tell junior devs asking "am I cooked?"

Chapters

0:00 — Introduction

1:15 — From Air Force crew chief to platform CTO: the "works on my machine" problem

2:44 — Why this is the most interesting moment in tech since the cloud

4:46 — AI is Home Depot for software: the citizen developer reframe

8:33 — The homegrown-app problem coming back to bite us

10:16 — How Minecraft kids built Coder, and the "first mile" problem

13:00 — Why the developer laptop is your biggest AI security hole

16:17 — AI is a Mensa student on caffeine: the identity fix that changes everything

19:31 — Uber blew through their AI budget in 4 months: the tokenomics trap

20:36 — Sovereign AI, open weights, and self-hosting the future

29:02 — The bottleneck moved: why GitHub can't keep up

31:46 — The airplane magazine trap: why bolting AI on will destroy you

36:33 — Software engineers have been doing two jobs this whole time

40:27 — GTG 1002 and why the disease is also the cure

43:02 — What happens to open source when AI writes the code

48:19 — What to tell junior devs asking "am I cooked?"

Guest: Nicky Pike, Field CTO, Coder — LinkedIn