Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

"We'll spend weeks shaving 10 minutes off CI, then let code sit waiting 18 hours for review." Luca and Rob discuss why AI isn't just changing how we write code, it’s forcing teams to rethink the entire software delivery process.

Stop context-switching between your IDE and CI dashboard. This video shows you how to connect Cursor to CircleCI using the CircleCI MCP server so your AI agent can read pipeline failures, validate configs, and trigger builds without leaving your editor. In this demo, we introduce a bug, let CI catch it, and watch the agent diagnose and fix it autonomously through a full green pipeline. No manual log hunting required.

For a 50-developer team operating at agentic pace, validation-related delivery costs can approach $900K a year.

Code review has always been a time sink. AI just makes the dysfunction undeniable. Luca Rossi, founder of Refactoring.fm and builder of the open source tool Tolaria, has been running one of engineering's most-read newsletters for five years, with over 170,000 subscribers. He's also been doing what a lot of engineering leaders talk about but rarely do: building a real product with AI agents to pressure-test what's actually possible today.

AI makes it easy to write more code. The question is whether that's actually a good thing.

Without constraints, feedback, and clear standards, AI can create complexity faster than teams can manage it.

The question isn't whether your proposal is good, it's whether it's more important than everything else competing for the same time, people, and budget. That's why the strongest proposals explain the impact, not just the work.