Built over Breakfast is Remobi's invite-only roundtable for senior tech leaders, hosted by Ethan Cohen, Director of Client Engagement (UK). Each session brings together a small, curated group for honest conversations on engineering leadership.
Our latest brought together leaders from capital markets, construction, consumer enterprise and enterprise software to tackle one question: has AI raised the skill floor, or lowered it?
Senior engineers are upskilling fast with AI, but junior engineers are not keeping pace. The distance between them is only growing. One attendee described junior coders on her team performing at roughly the same level as two years ago, despite having the same tools available. Her senior engineers, meanwhile, have noticeably accelerated.
The tools aren't the differentiator. It's about who's building real capability with them, and who isn't.
That split is reshaping team structures. The traditional pyramid is being pulled toward something closer to a diamond, with more weight sitting in the middle.
It's natural to ask: is the junior role being squeezed out? As AI takes on more of the routine work junior engineers used to do, there's less obvious entry-level work left, and fewer openings for someone starting out.
If AI can carry someone through school and university, are juniors building genuine foundational skills, or just leaning on the tool to get to the right answer? And if that's happening earlier, can education keep pace with what employers now expect from graduates?
The room agreed: the tools can get someone to a baseline. Anyone using AI at a decent level can look competent. What separates them is the critical thinking and judgement to know whether the output is right and what to do with it.
That has to be modelled from the top. If critical thinking is only expected of juniors while leaders treat AI as a shortcut, it never becomes the standard it needs to be.
There was real appetite for workplace placements, apprenticeships and in-person training days, structured ways to get people learning on the job rather than relying on university alone.
Ethan raised the idea of a paid trial day. Rather than judging a junior hire on a CV or interview, a short paid trial shows how someone works with a team, and whether they're open to using the tools, not just able to talk about them.
The thread running through all of it was the same. Push people into real workplace experience earlier. A degree alone isn't keeping pace.
Ethan raised a sharp point during the session. Software has never been easier to build, but that speed is coming at the cost of quality.
A mock-up isn't a working product. It's easy to put together something that looks right in a presentation. It's a different thing to know whether a user has tried it or whether the experience holds up once it's live.
Speed only counts as an advantage if what gets shipped is something people can rely on.
The conversation also turned to how tech leadership is evolving. In mid-market and smaller companies, the traditional CTO sometimes becomes something closer to a Head of R&D, as companies rethink what the role needs to look like at their size.
What a CTO needs to be good at also depends on their stage: a generalist across the stack in a small team, and a specialist as the company scales.
It's a shift already showing up in how the room sees things heading, with a move toward skill-based roles rather than C-suite titles. What someone can do is starting to matter more than what their title says.
The room didn't land on a single answer to whether AI raised or lowered the skill floor. What it agreed on is that the answer depends on what happens next: whether businesses build the placements and the top-down standards, or leave junior talent to figure it out alone against tools that are only getting sharper.
Built over Breakfast started as a small executive roundtable, and it's grown into a regular fixture for London's senior tech leaders. The format stays the same: curated roundtables built on honest conversations and valuable connections.
If that sounds like your kind of room, message Ethan Cohen to register your interest for Built over Breakfast.