{"id":2139,"date":"2025-11-23T21:02:55","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T15:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2025-11-23T21:12:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T15:42:08","slug":"when-to-delegate-work-to-a-virtual-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/when-to-delegate-work-to-a-virtual-engineer\/","title":{"rendered":"When to Delegate Work to a Virtual Engineer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Introduction<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who is a Virtual Engineer?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

What’s your personal experience with virtual engineers? Tell me about the workflow that you rely upon to make you a 10x engineer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With rapid advances in the field of engineering, when should you delegate work to a virtual engineer? Furthermore, what is a virtual engineer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[722],"tags":[709,726,725,728,727,724,729,723],"class_list":["post-2139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-virtual-engineering","tag-ai","tag-cursor","tag-cursor-cloud-agents","tag-engineering","tag-github","tag-github-copilot","tag-remote-engineer","tag-virtual-engineer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqtyx-yv","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1659,"url":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/clion-and-openframeworks\/","url_meta":{"origin":2139,"position":0},"title":"CLion 1.1.1 and openFrameworks 0.8.4","author":"Jude Pereira","date":"October 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"A basic template to start building oF projects using CMake within CLion. It's here on GitHub! All credits go to kureta for the CMake files. I've just pieced it together as a project which can be imported.","rel":"","context":"In "another snippet | code"","block_context":{"text":"another snippet | code","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1696,"url":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/mocking-the-http2-apple-push-notification-gateway-in-go\/","url_meta":{"origin":2139,"position":1},"title":"Mocking the HTTP\/2 Apple push notification gateway in Go","author":"Jude Pereira","date":"February 17, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"At CleverTap, we had the need to mock the new HTTP\/2 Apple push gateway API. After trying to do this in Java, and then in Python, I succeeded in getting it to work in Go. Go out of all languages! To me, Go has a completely strange syntax, compared to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "another snippet | code"","block_context":{"text":"another snippet | code","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1675,"url":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/sending-notifications-via-apples-new-http2-api-using-jetty-9-3-6\/","url_meta":{"origin":2139,"position":2},"title":"Sending notifications via Apple’s new HTTP\/2 API (using Jetty 9.3.6)","author":"Jude Pereira","date":"January 9, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"HTTP\/2 is still very much new to Java, and as such, there are just two libraries who support it - Jetty (from 9.3), and Netty (in alpha). If you're going the Jetty way (as I have), you'll need to add their ALPN library to your boot classpath. Note: Jetty 9.3.x\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "another snippet | code"","block_context":{"text":"another snippet | code","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/category\/code\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1881,"url":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/nrf52840-flash-s340\/","url_meta":{"origin":2139,"position":3},"title":"nRF52840 – flashing the s340 v6.1.1 SoftDevice","author":"Jude Pereira","date":"July 12, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"This post is a work in progress (WIP). The result of this experiment is a success. I have flashed my SparkFun nRF52840 mini, and I'm able to run the bicycle combined speed & cadence sensor example. Before we begin, \u00a0a big hats off to\u00a0Charles, who brought support for the SparkFun\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "hardware"","block_context":{"text":"hardware","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/category\/hardware\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2094,"url":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/the-are-you-sure-chatgpt-hack\/","url_meta":{"origin":2139,"position":4},"title":"The “Are you sure?” ChatGPT Hack","author":"Jude Pereira","date":"June 30, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"The more I use ChatGPT, the more I tend to learn about its intricacies and nuances. One of my latest discoveries is the \"Are you sure?\" hack: Yet another example: This is just me trying to have some fun now ;) Both chats were with 4o. What's the take away?\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "miscellaneous"","block_context":{"text":"miscellaneous","link":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/category\/misc\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/are-you-sure-1.gif?fit=400%2C223&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2139"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2152,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2139\/revisions\/2152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judepereira.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}