Show notes
AI coding agents can help engineering teams ship more code. But the bigger change may be what engineers spend their time doing.
Viren Baraiya, Co-Founder and CTO of Orkes, joins The Tech Trek to discuss how AI is changing workflow orchestration, engineering productivity, project delivery, and hiring. As agents take on more implementation work, engineers are spending more time on design, architecture, review, and verification.
Viren shares how his team measures the return on AI through product velocity, stability, and the ability to build things that previously required more time or outside resources. He also explains how Orkes manages model costs by using stronger models for difficult reasoning and smaller models for implementation.
Key Takeaways
• Coding agents increase output, but they also increase the need for verification.
• Engineers are shifting from pure implementation toward design, review, and orchestration.
• Repeated AI tasks can become reusable workflows that reduce ongoing token usage.
• Hiring should test how engineers actually work with agents, not just manual coding.
Highlights
01:21 Why agents are workflows and where orchestration fits into AI systems
05:19 How AI changed feature velocity, testing, and customer engineering at Orkes
07:44 Measuring AI ROI through velocity, stability, and new product capabilities
09:19 Why engineers increasingly look more like tech leads
12:56 Turning repeated AI requests into reusable workflows to reduce token usage
19:34 Why Orkes changed engineering interviews to include agentic coding
One Line That Stuck
“That has become a more important skill than actually writing the code now.”
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