AI-Native Engineering Culture from a CTO

**Mike Rollins** (0:00)
The big milestones for us were, we started from, you know, everybody's using AI to code. We moved into, hey, when's the last time any of y'all actually looked at the code? And all my team was like, like everybody didn't want to get caught. I was like, oh, because I haven't looked at it in months. Yeah, and they were like, oh God, okay, thank you, thank you. Imposter syndrome that jumps out. When the juniorest member of the team posts something in the engineering slack that calls out something the most advanced engineer has done, and you're like, oh God, I'm not even a real engineer. And then you're like, oh wait, you had Claude look at that, didn't you? And they're like, you actually know it was Codex. You know?

**Bret Fisher** (0:44)
Welcome back to the Agentic DevOps podcast. And I'm your host, Bret Fisher. I have my friend Mike Rollins on. We went to lunch and the way he talked about his AI first engineering or agentic engineering or agentic development, whatever you want to call this thing, where you're throwing tokens mostly and not writing anything anymore, and you're not even looking at code anymore. And he runs a team as a CTO, a small team and a startup. And I wanted to talk about what that life is like. Because a lot of us, you know, we're in enterprise or we're, I would call like legacy teams, where we're toying around with AI. We're certainly using it for code, but we're not necessarily riddling the entire pipeline of the software life cycle with everything AI, so that we never see code again and that everything just goes as fast as possible. Like most of us are somewhere in the middle or near the beginning, I think. And certainly with a lot of the people I talk to, where they aren't necessarily able to throw out the playbook that we've had for the last 20 years on how exactly a team uses Git storage and automated deployments and test-driven development and all the things that maybe were hot topics before AI. Right? So Mike and I go through a pretty lengthy conversation, but I wanted to get as detailed as possible to talk about the culture, the pros and cons, like what are the downsides of this? Tell me some horror stories of how this can go wrong in so many ways and what it's like trying to push the envelope, being on the bleeding edge of AI first development. So let's get into it. Mike, welcome to the show.
Tell the audience who you are and what you do for a living.

**Mike Rollins** (2:21)
So my name is Mike Rollins. The majority of my career has been in Silicon Valley. Back in 22, our company was getting bought by Twitter, and then this dude named Elon jumps in, and we were no longer being bought by Twitter.
As a result, I went on this multi-year escapade of, I worked for a healthcare startup, and then after I left the healthcare startup, or I was asked to leave the healthcare startup, because it turns out, if you ask very difficult questions pointedly, people don't like it. I ended up going out on my own, and it was terrifying, scary. I mean, from about 2023 until really November of last year, I was a contractor, and I did a bunch of stuff. I was the founding engineer for multiple projects. I was, I've been the CTO now of three different companies, though mostly fractional, and I have, at some point, the internal clock in my head is always ticking, and I feel this constant need to go faster. And so as I was building things, as typically the only engineer, the clock in my head is just faster, faster, faster. And so when AI became like a thing, meaning back in the latter half of 2024, and then especially at the beginning of 2025, myself and a few other folks, a guy named Thanos who he and I have a podcast together, they were kicking back off, called will.ai, I snapped that. We both just dove in. And what's funny is that since about really the entry of Claude Code into the market, I have been doing first engineering. And what I had noticed is that by the time we hit about May or June of last year, I was no longer writing code. And then right around November of this year, I realized I was no longer reading code. And it was this shocking realization. And so I basically dove head first into AI.
And high risk, high reward. The risk here is that my family can't eat. The reward is that I figure out a way to do engineering that other people don't know. And it's what we did. And so nowadays, I'm at this company called Relifi, and then also Family Digital, I'm CTO of both. And I have this team of four other engineers. And really truthfully, only one of them, well, one of them is a designer that we've turned into a front-end engineer, and none of us read code, none of us write code. We ship, we've built this agentic system that's built from the ground up for sharing, and it's built at right angles to the way everybody else is doing things. And we are moving so fast, it's terrifying. But the clock continues to tick, and I continue to think, how do we go faster, faster, faster, faster? But never in my life. I got to ride mobile, and I started writing code for iOS and then Android, and mobile felt amazing, felt like a freaking rocket ship. Everything changed so fast because there was a new phone about every three months. And now it's, dude, didn't we just see a new frontier model a week and a half ago? Because we did, and it's just unbelievable. So anyway, that's how I ended up here.