Introduction
The engineering landscape is changing drastically every single day, with advances in AI. Naturally, this leads us to the next generation of engineers, which I’ve termed as Virtual Engineers.
Who is a Virtual Engineer?
A Virtual Engineer is a background AI agent such as GitHub’s Copilot Coding Agent, or Cursor’s Cloud Agents. These agents have unleashed productivity in a way like never before. Simple and complex features may be crafted with ease by creating an issue on GitHub, and assigning it to a virtual engineer. Then, they DM you within 20 minutes or so (Copilot’s standard TAT), asking you to review their work. In most cases, it’s about 90% correct, and further refinement of their work is possible by tagging them in a PR review.
A human engineer who knows their code base relatively well can cue in a prompt so apt, that it leaves little wiggle room for AI to go wild. In my experience with them, they’re as solid as a staff engineer.
Of course, there are moments when you shouldn’t delegate your work to a virtual engineer. Here’s a flowchart that I crafted to help you decide:
What’s your personal experience with virtual engineers? Tell me about the workflow that you rely upon to make you a 10x engineer.
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