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Giving developers AI tools is only the first step.

AI can answer the question. But can it replace the mentor? Rob, Hanabel, and Webster discuss what junior developers need in the age of AI.

Last year was the year of AI code generation. This year is everything that comes after: validation, quality, and making sure what gets built actually ships. Nobody's better positioned to talk about that than CircleCI, and in this episode of Peer Review, CFO Blake Buisson and CMO Chitra Balasubramanian dig into what that moment means for the company and the people building it.

Seven years of institutional knowledge meets a fresh outside perspective in this episode of Peer Review. June Ko is CircleCI's Chief Legal Officer. Judson Griffin is the Chief Revenue Officer. They cover what tenure without complacency actually looks like, why boomerang hires keep happening across every region and role, and what it means to be in the middle of a market moment most people won't recognize until it's already passed. Judson's advice: get in front of the rocket and hold on. June's take: being uncomfortable is the new normal, so you might as well get good at it.

Jim Rose and Rob Zuber have been working together since 2011. By now they can plan a quarter with hand signals. But this episode of Peer Review isn't about how well they know each other. It's about what they're still figuring out. CircleCI's CEO and CTO sit down to talk about what they've always believed about software delivery (it's about outcomes, not craft), how the pace of change has forced them back into the trenches of actually building, and what it means to lead a technical organization when the state of the art is shifting faster than any pitch deck can keep up with.

Everyone keeps saying we don't need junior engineers anymore. This episode makes the case that's exactly wrong. Rob sits down with two CircleCI colleagues at opposite ends of the experience spectrum: Hanabel Mengistu, a new grad less than a year into her first engineering role, and Michael Webster, who has been writing software professionally since 2012. Together they explore what it actually feels like to enter the industry right now, when AI has reshuffled the deck for everyone.

We intentionally introduced a bug into our app to see what would happen. The agent used the CircleCI MCP Server to detect the failed pipeline, diagnose the issue from the build logs, implement a fix, and keep iterating until CI was green.

Code generation gets all the attention, but one of AI's biggest strengths might be helping non-engineers prototype ideas, explore solutions, and get work done that otherwise never would have happened.