Engineering Leader: AI Won’t Replace Engineers, and It May Not Save You Money

AI has made writing software easier than ever. Maintaining it is a different story. Rafal Hryniow is the SVP of Engineering at Trilogy, a company that acquires and runs B2B software companies, supporting large, often decades-old products with remarkably small, fully remote engineering teams. Trilogy was building software with AI long before the rest of the industry caught on, and Rafal is now part of the team pushing it toward a fully agentic model. He explains: ◼️ Why AI may not save you any money at all, and how smarter model choices change the math ◼️ Why building your own software with AI is easy, but maintaining it is where the real cost hides ◼️ Whether AI can really cut engineering teams in half, and the hidden cost of moving too fast ◼️ Why the engineer's role is shifting from writing code to reviewing and challenging what AI produces ◼️ How AI turns days of bug investigation in complex, legacy systems into minutes ◼️ What companies should invest in before scaling AI, and why training your own models isn't it ◼️ Why the era of deep specialization is ending, and fundamentals matter more than ever ◼️ What young engineers should learn to stay valuable in the next five years 00:00 Intro Highlights 01:17 How AI Is Changing Software Development 03:51 The Engineer's New Role: Review and Critical Thinking 06:26 AI Agents in Practice: Efficiency Without Sacrificing Quality 09:26 Trusting AI and the Value of Experience 13:20 Investigating Problems in Complex Software Products 17:01 Generalists vs. Specialists in the AI Era 20:59 Where Companies Should Invest in AI 23:26 Context, Documentation, and Test Harnesses for AI Agents 26:44 What Early-Career Engineers Should Learn 30:31 The Human Skills Becoming More Valuable 31:40 Productivity, Team Size, and the Risks of Moving Faster with AI 41:23 Model Costs and Smarter AI Workflows Watch also on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7L0Y... See all episodes: https://intelactmedia.com Follow Intelact Media Podcast: YouTube:    / @intelactmedia   LinkedIn:   / intelactmedia