AI for the Fortune 2000: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native SDLC — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess

Last year, Alex Lieberman and his cofounder joined us to explain Tenex’s unusual bet: pay AI engineers for the work they deliver, rather than the hours they spend at a keyboard. If AI makes an engineer faster, an hourly rate can make the engineer less money for the same job. Tenex wanted the incentives to run the other way. At AIE New York, Alex came back with CJ Hess to talk about what happens when you scale that idea into an engineering organization. We also put one of our own experiments on the table: Kill My SaaS, where we asked builders to replace a conference speaker-management tool we were quoted $43,000 a year to use. Both stories raise the same question: when building gets cheaper, how do you decide what good work is worth? Tenex still uses story points as an important part of engineering compensation. Alex says the feared failure modes—people inflating estimates or shipping bad code to rack up points—haven’t been the biggest problem. Tenex’s AI strategists are responsible for customer retention and growth, giving them an incentive to push back on work that doesn’t serve the client. The harder question is how to reward work that doesn’t…