He Stopped Coding for a Decade. AI Brought Him Back.

In 2013, Andy Fang wrote DoorDash's first lines of code from his Stanford dorm room. As the company grew, he gradually stepped away from coding until he stopped entirely. That pause lasted more than ten years. This year, he started shipping new features into DoorDash's live codebase again, using AI coding tools. He calls it a "major comeback." His reason is specific. If he didn't personally use these tools, he said, if he didn't personally walk through DoorDash's entire deployment pipeline, he couldn't know where his engineers were actually getting stuck. To evaluate whether something is hard, you have to feel where the difficulty is. He turned this into a company expectation: every engineering manager at DoorDash should set a personal goal to ship production-level code, going through the full pipeline, not just running a test version locally. Walk through it yourself, he said, and you'll see two things at once: where the tools hit their limits, and what's genuinely slowing your team down. He went back to the codebase, he said, because he needed to keep the feeling fresh. AI has brought down the cost of execution significantly. Meeting materials get pre-summarized. Reports get drafted for you. Proposals get a first version generated before you ever weigh in. The efficiency case holds up. But your sense of whether something is good or not comes from years ago, when you were still doing it yourself. That sense expires. Over time, you can see the volume, but you start losing the ability to judge the quality. A manager mentioned something worth sitting with: the highest-performing AI users on his team were producing faster than ever, but their calendars were actually filling up more, not less. Output accelerated, and so did the number of underspecified tasks landing in their inbox. Moving fast, but less certain which direction to move in. After walking the full pipeline himself, Fang said looking at his engineers' work feels genuinely different now. He knows what's actually stuck. He knows what has a path forward. Next time you're evaluating someone's work, or deciding whether something is worth continuing, ask yourself: when did I last walk through this, end to end, myself?