Over the past few months, we've been shifting our engineering practice toward an AI-first workflow, where engineers — whom we now call ‘Builders’ — work with AI to build and iterate products across the full product lifecycle:
**Business goal → Product understanding → Product design → Requirement analysis → System design → Implementation → Review & Testing → Deployment**
AI participates from day 1 — brainstorming ideas, exploring product design, analyzing systems, generating technical specifications, producing implementations, and running tests. Builders work with AI throughout the process, providing the context AI cannot access directly or efficiently — product goals, business context, requirements, dependencies, and domain knowledge.
A key part of the Builder role is helping AI become the expert on the problem before implementation starts. You review and audit the results. When AI struggles, you treat it as a signal: identify what's missing and feed it back into the business and project context so the process gets better over time.