Mic Neale

Mic Neale is a Principal Engineer at Block working on AI and open source, including Goose, Block’s open-source AI platform. He is a co-founder of CloudBees and a former open source architect at Red Hat, with a background in developer tooling, distributed systems, Drools, and decentralized AI inference projects such as mesh-llm.

AI Engineering Must Preserve Craft as Work Shifts to Verification

At AI Engineer Melbourne, Jeremy Howard, Annie Vella and Mic Neale each argued against treating AI adoption as an automatic productivity upgrade. Howard warned that coding tools can simulate autonomy and flow while eroding mastery; Vella presented research showing engineers feel more productive even as parts of developer experience deteriorate; and Neale made the case for pooling idle edge devices as an alternative to defaulting all inference to centralized, metered infrastructure.

AI EngineerJun 4, 202619 min read