The Engineer Who Hasn't Written Code in 9 Months: Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs

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, Chief AI Officer 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.CHAPTERS0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn't work0:31 - Who Jack Rudenko is, and what's ahead in this episode1:27 - Welcome, meet Jack Rudenko, Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs1:48 - The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical3:36 - Why "AI native from scratch" beats bolting AI onto old processes8:53 - Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages11:20 - 500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents14:56 - The rise of the "non-engineering builder"17:06 - Why enterprise software is the real mess, not startups19:32 - The unexpected cost of working with AI, burnout, not laziness21:24 - Jack's actual workflow, plan mode, research, and acceptance criteria27:26 - Dark factories, evals, and "religion" versus "engineering" in AI29:49 - The skill nobody measured, loaded less than half the time32:52 - Why AST trees beat graph databases for AI code memory36:07 - From 10X to 50X, two projects AI made possible41:35 - What team size looks like when one person can do it all42:53 - Why no project is secure once a key exists46:44 - Artist, scientist, engineer, what actually makes you one51:04 - What junior engineers need to learn now54:45 - Cursor, YC founders, and the rise of the non-engineer builder59:35 - The addictive, exhausting superpower of building 10X more1:02:57 - Why "impossible" projects are worth the budget now1:04:55 - The future of software, giant platforms and a million small ones1:08:04 - Why consultancies are thriving, for now1:09:12 - "Claude Code is the worst software ever. I love it."1:11:22 - Open source, Jack's origin story, and why it built him1:15:23 - James's takeaway: religion vs engineering, and the challenge to measure your own AI rolloutABOUT THE GUESTJack 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.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.LINKSJack Rudenko, 10x Labs · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erudenko/James MacDonald, NTP Talent · LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamesmacdonaldau · Site: ntptalent.com.auHosted by James MacDonald, Managing Director of NTP Talent.---Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the team who helped build Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.