Friday: Fear. Monday: Agents.
Most IT teams will be deprecated in 2 years. Will you be deprecated? Unemployed? If your employment depends on how others accept tech — you need to know this.
Four days ago I presented agentic AI to a room full of Corporate American developers. What I got back was morbid fear — people stopped asking questions and started airing grievances.
This morning? The same team demoed adversarial agent teams collaborating and competing — from their own workstations.
Same people. Four days.
What Changed
Not the tool. Not the policy. Me.
Agentic AI — the real kind, like Claude Code or OpenCode — brings something we’ve never had before: tooling that teaches the user.
You don’t learn it, then use it. You use it, and it teaches you as you go.
All this team needed:
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A real agentic system (they picked Claude Code)
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A curated roadmap — three weeks to mastery, self-paced, with their agents and teammates
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Someone in the room who earns their respect — and teaches them to earn their own
Without the roadmap, they’d still adopt. The roadmap just compresses the timeline — from three months of fumbling to three weeks of directed progress.
Without me in the room? They’d still be scared.
Why Your Horse Won’t Drink
You’ve been dunking that horse in water, haven’t you?
I know you have — that’s 90% of my customers. JetBrains confirmed it: only senior developers adopt on their own. Everyone else ignores it. You make it a policy. Designs don’t change. Code stays crap. Velocity drops.
What gives?
It’s not about AI. It’s about people. Contact with a tool or a policy doesn’t change people. Human-to-human contact does. The right kind.
To follow you — they need to respect you.
To beat you — they need to respect themselves.
And that’s the part nobody told you.
This team transformed in four days because I was in the room. A real hacker, like them. Doing some cool hacking with them. Not just because the tool was magic — because someone showed up who could earn their respect and teach them to earn their own.
That’s what I do.
