AI changed mobile engineering faster than career advice caught up. A working first draft now takes seconds. The job moved to everything around it: deciding what's worth building, catching the bugs the model introduced, and owning the code once it ships.

Product sense, spec quality, release confidence, review discipline, business impact. These always mattered. Today they are what decides who keeps growing as an engineer and who stalls out.

I made the jump from Android engineer to EM, and these are the things I weigh in hiring and promotion calls. This talk is what I see from that seat.

You'll leave knowing:

- where to put your energy now that AI handles the first draft
- how to get the spec and product thinking right before you open IDE
- how to tie feature work to metrics you can actually point to
- how to review AI-assisted PRs and stay accountable for what ships
- what a promotion case looks for when a clean first draft is table stakes