FWIW I think the company writing this post is one of those small scale startups. But that being said, you're not the only one who thinks this. A decent amount of VCs and funds think that only smaller, newer companies have the potential to be truly AI native because there's too much organizational inertia in an existing business in keeping its existing human processes and so only a newer company can achieve the true "scaling potential" or using AI to scale without human labor.
Most engineers are working in "normal" engineering orgs, but can feel the ground underneath them shifting, and companies believe that if they are caught flat footed, they will be out competed in the marketplace, so they are all trying to make sure they are adopting it at least in a way that lets them keep pace if not accelerate revenue.
If you are not impacted by economic incentives, you can continue to not care about this transitional state, but most people do.
Engineering’s job has always been to deal with hard technical challenges and apply new technologies.
Writing code was never the point. Predictably creating specific outcomes was. Wrangling AI in a way that multiplies productivity is the new job.
I won’t lie, it kind of sucks to be young right now, learn about punch cards and assembly in school, and then graduate into a market that’s moved on to Fortran. Sorry, I meant high level languages and AI. To say otherwise might imply the industry has seen a similar shift in the past where engineers made the exact same complaints practically verbatim.
Regardless, the reality is that college teaches very little about 90% of real engineering work anyway, and we still need to hire smart people for this new type of work.
But we're a tiny baby startup, so things like "spin up a new product with 1 engineer and get to $1m in revenue on it" or "reduce our IaaS bill by 300k/yr" is a meaningful contribution for us.
We're also building new AI-enabled software that was not possible before.
The big breakout hits have been AI Infra, but that makes sense from a technological perspective, Cisco made a lot of money well before Google did, but Cisco is not where the money concentrated in the end.
We don't really know what the equivalent of Google as an application business will be in the AI era, but there's a pretty big chance it's not actual Google. But Google still has to do it's best to hold on.
Does not apply to everything though. E.G: I don’t care about AI support for my non work chats/email, since I’d rather not give it access.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/technology/ai-billion-dol...
https://www.businessinsider.com/medvi-ai-weight-loss-million...
defer to the AI
A company which proclaims they are "AI-native" isn't actually interested in engineering, they are trying to ride the hype wave. Companies who care about engineering just... do engineering, and don't make a big deal out of whether they are chasing trends.
"If that sounds outlandish, that's because it is. We don't have such capable AI systems yet."