The Engineer Who Hasn’t Written Code in 9 Months: Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs
Audio & video
Jack Rudenko hasn’t written a line of code himself in nine months. In that time, his team has shipped six or seven products used by millions of people, and he says that gap, between who writes the code and who’s actually building, is the whole story of engineering right now.
In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Jack Rudenko, Partner and Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building an AI-native engineering practice from the ground up. They get into the project everyone called impossible before AI made it a three-month build, why working with AI agents is more exhausting than writing code ever was, and what actually separates an engineer from an artist or a scientist now that the code itself isn’t the hard part.
It’s a hands-on, practitioner’s take on what building with AI agents actually looks like day to day, not the conference-keynote version. They cover Jack’s own workflow for briefing an AI agent, why he doesn’t trust any project’s security the moment an API key exists, the “non-engineering builders” quietly out-building agencies, and why he calls Claude Code some of the worst-engineered software he’s ever used, and also the tool he loves most.
About the guest
Jack Rudenko is Partner and Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.
About the show
Building Tech Teams is hosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent, and produced by Day One®, the team that helped build Blackbird Ventures’ Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and Pick My Brain.
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