Building Tech Teams with James MacDonald 
About Jack Rudenko
Jack Rudenko is Partner and Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs, where he built the engineering operation behind the firm's work, from startup MVPs to enterprise platforms that handle billions of data points. Over the past two years he has built the team's AI-native engineering practice, Magus. He works across cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and is a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.
On Building Tech Teams, he told James MacDonald why he had not written a line of code himself in nine months, using a three-system integration project as a case study.
- Talks about
- AI, Hiring & Team, Leadership
In conversation.
1 episode
Building Tech Teams with James MacDonald Go straight to the good bits.
Key moments from The Engineer Who Hasn’t Written Code in 9 Months: Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs.
- 0:00Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn’t work
- 0:31Who Jack Rudenko is, and what’s ahead in this episode
- 1:48The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical
- 3:36Why “AI native from scratch” beats bolting AI onto old processes
- 8:53Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages
- 11:20500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents
- 14:56The rise of the “non-engineering builder”
- 17:06Why enterprise software is the real mess, not startups
- 19:32The unexpected cost of working with AI, burnout, not laziness
- 21:24Jack’s actual workflow, plan mode, research, and acceptance criteria
The path so far.
- Now
Partner & Chief AI and Technical Strategist · 10x Labs
- Earlier · Startup
Founder · MadAppGang
Sources: player.captivate.fm
10x Labs on Day One
10x Labs is a Sydney software engineering and AI consultancy that builds and scales digital platforms for clients in energy, logistics and healthcare.
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