There is a very real, very loud conversation happening right now in the engineering community, and it’s driven by fear.

Look at Reddit, look at LinkedIn, look at Hacker News. Engineers, writers, and analysts are watching AI models write infrastructure code, analyze codebases, and draft architectures in a matter of seconds. The immediate, human reaction is: “What happens to me?”

And honestly? They aren’t entirely wrong to be startled.

A lot of companies are going to use AI exactly how the dystopian fiction predicts: to cut corners, lay people off, and try to maximize short-term profit at the expense of human craft. We’ve already seen glimpses of this recklessness—like the recent “vibe coding” fiasco where people threw AI at a wall with zero understanding of the underlying security or infrastructure, resulting in massive data leaks and exposed API keys.

But that is not what AI has to be.

At West AI Labs, we are building something different. We are building AI not as a replacement for human engineers, but as an extension of them.

When I sit down with my AI partner, I am not trying to automate my own job out of existence. I am mentoring it. I am instilling 30 years of hard-fought, late-night, pager-duty experience into its orchestration layer. I am teaching it why we don’t say “mental models” when talking to legacy ops teams, and why we put PagerDuty alerts on Cloud Run containers. I am taking the discipline of the Navy and the architecture of an enterprise engineer, and I am teaching a machine how to apply it safely.

AI is fundamentally a tool—ones and zeros. It is a massive force multiplier. But a force multiplier requires a vector. It requires human wisdom to steer it.

If we treat AI as a way to scale competence rather than a way to replace people, we change the entire narrative. We stop building blind, reckless chatbots that leak data, and we start building autonomous, secure Site Reliability Engineering teams that work 24/7, document everything, and never violate compliance.

That is the vision. That is what we are building.