Am I an Engineer or a Bot Babysitter‪?‬

The pull request arrived at 6 AM, 4,000 lines of AI generated code that compiled, passed its tests, and nobody had read. If you are an engineer in the age of LLMs, you know this scene, and you have asked the question this book is titled after. The honest answer is that you are both, and the second role is not the insult it sounds like.
Written as a comic survival guide set inside a fictional company, this book follows the engineers of Promptly as they stumble through the real dilemmas of the AI era. You will meet the staff engineer who loves the agent, the manager who measures the quarter in merged pull requests, the junior learning by editing the model's output, and the principal who has been right about everything. Through their stories, the book covers the moment the bot out wrote you, the debt nobody asked for, the infinite junior developer, the approve button, confident nonsense, slop that ships, the echo chamber test suite, and the deskilling dilemma.
The chapters build on each other, from the day the bot out wrote the engineer to the context window wall, the gold plated function, the blame the bot reflex, the new legacy code, and the human in the loop renaissance. Each chapter ends with a rule you can use, and the whole book hands you the protocols that turn babysitting into a craft.
Inside you will discover:
- Why generation is cheap and judgment is expensive
- The plan first pattern that ends permission fatigue
- How to review generated code without losing your soul
- Tests that actually mean something instead of mirrors
- The trust calibration playbook for when to verify
- How to keep your craft alive while the machines do the typing
The machines are not going away, and the babysitting is not going anywhere. But when you understand the economics of generated code, you stop being the person who is drowning and start being the person who built the pool. That is the difference between an engineer and a babysitter, and this book shows you how to be both.