I was having a chat with a couple of friends about how comfortable we are sharing what we know in public. Two of us work in tech, the third doesn't. She'd just vibe-coded a genuinely useful tool for a client, not a side project she was tinkering with for fun, but something that solved a real problem. She was proud of it. She also wasn't sure she should post about it, write about it, or bring it up in a room full of people who write code for a living.
I know all too well how that feels. Even I catch myself wondering if what I'm sharing is too basic. Some tip about prompting or a workflow that feels obvious inside Zapier, and I hesitate. Then I remember where I was six months ago, and that I'm miles ahead of that version of myself. Plenty of people are just now getting started, and what feels old hat to me might be exactly what they needed to hear.
Part of the hesitation is just putting yourself out there. But part of it is that the baseline for what counts as “using AI well” depends heavily on where you work, and she didn't have a company giving her a script for any of this.
At Zapier, we've been living in this for a while. People are expected to work with agents, use AI in their day-to-day, move faster than they could a year ago. Everyone is being evaluated on it, not just engineers. The minimum bar inside our org is probably higher than at a company that's still figuring out its AI policy.
That gap shows up everywhere once you start paying attention.
What a higher floor actually looks like
On my team, the baseline has shifted. Engineers are closing more PRs, PMs on other teams are prototyping in an afternoon what used to take a sprint, and I'm using AI for meeting prep, follow-ups, and the admin work that used to eat my afternoons. @Zapier teams are shipping faster than ever before, with access to the tools and resources they need.
If you're leading at a company that's already here, your job is to name where the bar is and help people hit it without burning out. If you're at a company that's earlier, your job is messier: make the case, carve out room to experiment, and be straight about what's coming. I've done both kinds of conversations this year. Neither is easy.
Knowing where you fall on the spectrum
One thing that's helped at Zapier is that we stopped pretending the spectrum was vague. We named the levels.
This is the rubric we use for engineering, updated this past March. I'm sharing it because I haven't seen many companies put their version in writing, and is not a useful instruction without one.