Technical leaders should have the largest AI exhaust

Technical leaders should actively use AI coding agents themselves rather than stepping back from hands-on work, because the field lacks established best practices for building with AI and only firsthand experimentation can answer critical questions about code review, context management, and agent autonomy. Unlike previous eras where senior engineers could maintain influence through mentorship and architecture work alone, the rapidly evolving AI development landscape requires leaders to gain direct experience with new tools and approaches to guide their teams effectively. Senior engineers should therefore produce significant "AI exhaust" (token usage and code output) while leveraging their broader organizational influence to establish how their teams should work with coding agents.