Most engineering teams using AI are maybe 2x faster. Not 10x. Jeff Lee-Chan, engineering manager at Snap with 17 years at Google and Snapchat, explains where the bottleneck actually moved and what it would take to get to 10x. Jeff started as a junior engineer at Google, spent a decade at YouTube climbing to staff engineer, then moved to Snapchat where he became an engineering manager. He now spends 20 to 30 hours a week outside work experimenting with AI tools. In this episode, he walks through what the AI stack actually looks like inside Big Tech, why most companies haven't experienced the 10x productivity gains yet, and where the software development lifecycle is still broken. He also shares his take on flatter org structures, the shrinking junior engineer pipeline, and the one management mistake he'd warn every new leader about.

Jeff Lee-Chan is a Software Engineering Manager at Snap. He previously spent 10 years at Google working on YouTube, where he reached staff engineer and became a de facto people lead. He mentors engineers through MentorCruise and is active in the AI tooling space.

Links & resources

Jeff Lee-Chan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrey-lee-chan/

Mentoring with Jeff: https://mentorcruise.com/mentor/jeffreylee-chan/

OpenClaw (Peter Steinberger): https://steipete.me/

CMUX terminal: https://www.cmux.dev/

Hermes Agent: https://github.com/nousresearch/hermes-agent

Agent Orchestrator (Composio): https://github.com/ComposioHQ/agent-orchestrator

Karpathy's LLM Wiki: https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f

Harness Engineering (OpenAI article): https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/

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The Stellar Work Podcast

Conversations on transformation, flow, and the future of work.🎧

Listen on all platforms: https://stellarwork.start.page

📬 Newsletter: https://substack.com/@stellarwork

💼 Host: Ben, founder of Stellar Work

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