The Window Crew · Reuben Ingber

There are ten guys in my apartment right now installing windows. It’s a small apartment — the kind of small where ten guys and a stack of glass makes it feel like there’s no floor left. And yet somehow it doesn’t feel chaotic. It feels like the opposite.

Someone’s on the sill, someone’s below him passing up a bead of caulk before he even asks for it, someone else is breaking down cardboard by the door without being told to. Nobody’s checking a task list. There’s a rhythm to it — the kind that only comes from having done this together enough times that the coordination doesn’t need words anymore.

I keep stopping what I’m doing just to listen to them work.

I manage an engineering team, and I can’t stop thinking about what this crew has that most of my Slack channels don’t.

A year or two ago, an engineering project similar in size would’ve needed all ten of these guys, all day, coordinating in real time. Today, on my side of the world, a single engineer with the right AI tooling can ship what used to take a team of five. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s happening on my team right now. And by every measure that matters to the business, it’s a win — faster, cheaper, less overhead, less to manage.

I believe that. I’m not writing this to argue against it. In fact I believe this is a good thing for us in the long term.

But I keep coming back to the ten guys in my living room, and what they have that a single engineer typing into an AI tool at 9pm alone does not.

There’s a specific kind of bond that only forms when a group of people are stuck on the same hard thing together. Not adjacent to each other, working on their own tickets in parallel — actually stuck, actually leaning on each other to get unstuck. I remember what that felt like early in my career: three of us around one screen, no one leaving because no one wanted to leave the others hanging. That wasn’t a team-building exercise. Nobody scheduled it. It just happened, because the work required it.

That’s the thing AI is quietly making optional. Not the output — the output is often better now, faster, more consistent. What’s optional is the part where you needed each other. And when you don’t need each other, you stop finding out what it’s like to be needed.

I don’t think that’s a small loss. I think it might be the thing engineering leadership is least prepared for, because none of our metrics were built to catch it. Velocity goes up. Team happiness scores don’t ask “when did you last feel like you were in the trenches with someone.”

I don’t think the answer is to slow down, or to pretend the efficiency isn’t real. That’s not a fight worth having, and I wouldn’t win it if it were.

But I do think it’s on us — the people managing these teams — to go looking for the version of “stuck together” that still exists on the other side of this. Maybe it’s not shipping the feature together anymore. Maybe it’s the design review that actually argues something out in a room. Maybe it’s mentorship, or the incident at 2am that still needs five people even in a world where the ticket didn’t. The work that creates the bond might have to be chosen now, deliberately, instead of just falling out of the org chart the way it used to.

If we don’t choose it, I don’t think it comes back on its own.

The window guys are still out there right now, one of them laughing at something I can’t hear from in here. I don’t know if they’ll remember this apartment specifically. But I’d bet they will remember each other.