For a lot of people, AI started out as a net negative.
You’re reviewing documents someone couldn’t be bothered to write themselves. You’re having your time wasted by PRs generated by someone who never tried to understand the problem. The efficiency gains everyone keeps talking about haven’t really shown up in your week – but the expectation of those efficiency gains has, and somehow your workload is bigger, not smaller.
And then you spend five minutes on the internet and feel hopelessly behind.
The industry is shifting. Competence in this is not optional. But how do you build it amidst so much overwhelm and anxiety?
Jean and I have been thinking a lot about how AI fits into the developer career. We see its impact in DRI Your Career and in the EM Survival Guide courses, and in our 1:1 coaching. And for ourselves — we’ve found a way to make it positive, but along the way we broke things, DDOS’d each other, and threw out our workflows multiple times.
The reality of change is that it’s messy and often also emotional. We wanted to build something that made space for the mess and for the emotions — but takes you through to the other side, where you feel more competent and can apply what you’ve learned to the actual context you work in.
What is Navigating the AI Shift?
Navigating the AI Shift is a 4-module course for engineers and engineering managers who want to move from anxious and reactive to capable. It’s not a technical deep-dive into AI/ML systems, and it’s not a prompt-engineering tip sheet. It’s a course about building fluency through a real project, with the structure and feedback to make it stick.
The course has 4 modules:
- Navigating the Identity Threat — What’s actually changing in the job, and where your existing skills are more important than ever.
- Your Project, Part 1 — Find an idea that’s yours, scope it to something you can ship, and get moving.
- Your Project, Part 2 — Go deeper: constraining problems well, evaluating output, adding guardrails like tests and documentation.
- Bringing It Back to Your Team — How to remove bottlenecks, systematise solvable problems, and build a learning culture that supports AI effectiveness across your team.
Each module includes:
- Written content and frameworks
- Audio conversations between Jean and me — personal stories and reflections you can listen to on a walk
- Exercises to apply what you’ve learned to your situation
- Personal feedback from us on your submissions
- Project work you drive at your own pace
Two ways to take it: standard or accelerated
This is new for this course. Our normal 8-week pacing lets things sink in between modules and accounts for life in between. For people who want to move faster — and have the capacity to block off half a day a week to make that happen, we’re offering an accelerated 4-week version.
- Standard pace (8 weeks): A new module every two weeks. Around 60 minutes a week — fits around a busy schedule.
- Accelerated pace (4 weeks): A new module every week. Built for people who feel the urgency and can commit to half a day a week of focused time.
Same structure, same content, same personalized feedback from us. The accelerated option is for giving you a container for the focused time you already know you need to carve out, and a level of accountability that holds you to it.
Why now?
It’s an intense time in tech right now, and most jobs are more pressured than ever. The promise of stability from being a good developer is gone. We know we need to learn and adapt, but it’s hard to do that from a place of threat. It can also be hard to do that on the job when workload and pressure to deliver feel higher than ever.
If you’ve been feeling anxious, behind, or quietly resentful about the AI transition — that’s a reasonable response. But it’s not constructive, and it doesn’t serve you.
This course is for you if you want to get clear on which of your skills transfer, build something real, and come out the other side with more confidence in your own judgement (which, it turns out, is the thing that matters most).
It’s not for you if you’re already fluent with AI tools and want advanced techniques, or if you want a technical deep-dive into AI/ML internals.
Enrollment is open now.
Early bird pricing: $449 USD (available until April 30th)
Regular pricing: $499 USD
We start May 11th, 2026, and we’d love for you to join us.
You can also preview the intro module for free to see what the course experience is like.
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