Glue work is still harmful in the age of AI

I am not a believer in glue work1. Processes that can only be sustained by the unrewarded sacrifice of engineers ought to die. Now that LLMs are writing most of our code, does that free human engineers up to do more glue work? No, it doesn’t. I think glue work is actually less important to companies than it was in the 2010s. Let’s go through four reasons why. First, AI decreases the amount of coordination needed to ship. The magnifying effect of AI agents means that any single engineer can now take on projects that would previously have needed a small team. A lot of glue work was helping with coordination: booking kickoff and status meetings, passing around internal updates, and so on. A single engineer doesn’t need to do any of that. Second, engineers in the 2020s require less “careful handling”. In my experience, the most important subcategory of coordination-based glue work was managing difficult people. Many companies have secret gatekeepers: engineers with outsized influence and…

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