“You can’t credit the architects without looking at what they built. Or what broke.”
This issue of Redeployed is brought to you by Tecla: The headlines celebrate the visionaries. But production still depends on the ones reviewing AI code at midnight. Tecla helps you hire senior Webflow developers who thrive in the in-between where design, code, and AI converge. They’re not chasing the hype. They’re reinforcing the stack so it holds under pressure.
Last week, Time Magazine announced its 2025 Person of the Year: the Architects of AI.
Not a single individual, but a curated group. Executives, researchers, founders, and product leaders who shaped the rise of artificial intelligence. The ones who scaled it. Commercialized it. Pushed it from lab demo to production pipeline. Their names are familiar: Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Fei-Fei Li, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk. The usual cast of architects.
On the surface, it makes sense. The past 12 months have been defined by AI’s reach. It has reshaped product roadmaps, rewritten job descriptions, and restructured global R&D spend. Enterprises, governments, and startups are building around it. Of course the people behind the curtain would be recognized.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: if these are the architects, what exactly did they build?
And who is living in it?
Because the Person of the Year title implies not just achievement, but impact. It is a way of saying, “This person shaped the world you are standing in right now.” Which means we need to look beyond the headlines and ask what that world actually feels like for the people inside it.
For developers? It means learning to read code written by a machine that does not explain itself. It means reviewing AI-generated pull requests at 3x the usual volume, with half the context. It means security holes that look like productivity wins until someone gets breached.
For engineering leaders? It means rewriting team structure. Rebalancing who does what. Screening for AI fluency as much as raw technical skill. And trying to figure out how to measure output when half of it is ghostwritten.
For product teams? It means moving faster than their QA processes can keep up with. It means fielding feedback from users who think the AI is the product, not just a layer of it.
None of this is an accident. It is architecture.
So yes, Time is right to spotlight the minds behind this transformation. But it is equally fair to ask: where are the people caught underneath it?
Where is the platform engineer who reverse-engineered a runaway agent loop before it hit prod? Where is the QA lead who built a new framework to test LLM hallucinations? Where is the dev team that shipped a safer AI deployment stack no one ever heard about because it worked?
Those are architects too. They are just building reinforcement instead of exposure.
What Time doesn’t show are the teams making these systems survivable. The engineers who sit between ambition and reality. The ones who review AI-generated code, patch edge cases, slow things down when needed, and keep production from catching fire. Increasingly, companies are building that layer with senior engineers who already know how to work alongside AI, not chase it. Often nearshore, often in the same time zone, often invisible. Not the architects on the cover, but the ones reinforcing the structure so it doesn’t collapse. This is how some teams are doing it quietly.
There is a version of this story where Person of the Year means more than vision and velocity. It means stewardship. Judgment. Restraint.
But restraint does not make the front page.
More to come...
Recommended Reads
✔️ AI‑Generated Code Is More Buggy and Risky Than Human Output — TechRadar
✔️ Invisible Workers Fuel the AI Economy — ILO Analysis
– Gino Ferrand, Founder @ Tecla