Show Notes
Most CTOs think adopting AI means picking the right tools, but Sumeet argues the real work is closing the accountability gap between agents and engineers.
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My guest this week is Sumeet Vaidya, co-founder and CEO of Crafting, who spent years at Facebook, Uber, and Discord before building the infrastructure enterprise engineering teams now use to put agents to work safely.
His perspective matters because he sees what CTOs say publicly, and what their teams are actually doing internally, and the gap is bigger than most leaders want to admit.
Roughly 80% of enterprise engineering orgs, he estimates, are doing close to nothing meaningful with AI. The rest are either reacting to hype or trying to build something durable, and the difference is not the tools they pick.
One partner running 3,000 agents against 250 engineers changed how he thinks about capacity entirely. That number is where his six diagnostic questions come from and where the cracks appear first: brittle CI/CD, accountability gaps for agents, and a hiring pattern that's storing up debt for the next downturn.
If you're under pressure to show AI gains while cutting token spend, this one is aimed at you.
You'll Learn:
[0:00] Introduction [2:25] The disconnect between what companies say and what teams do [4:38] Why 80% of enterprises watch and wait on agents [9:31] Chasing the latest model as a vanity metric [14:14] Resilient cultures survive shocks that short-term thinking cannot [15:46] The engineering cultures that shaped Sumeet's career [28:51] Silicon Valley is not the whole world [33:02] What breaks if you 10X the team today [42:31] Hiring only senior engineers stores up hidden debt [47:11] Turning engineers from code writers into builders
Find more from Sumeet Vaidya on LinkedIn, X, or explore the Crafting Website.
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