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.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn't work

0:31 - Who Jack Rudenko is, and what's ahead in this episode

1:27 - Welcome, meet Jack Rudenko, Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs

1:48 - The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical

3:36 - Why "AI native from scratch" beats bolting AI onto old processes

8:53 - Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages

11:20 - 500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents

14:56 - The rise of the "non-engineering builder"