# AI as the Next Abstraction Layer: How I see engineering evolving at Thumbtack

DevFeed: [AI as the Next Abstraction Layer: How I see engineering evolving at Thumbtack](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/ai-as-the-next-abstraction-layer-how-i-see-engineering-evolving-at-thumbtack-24721.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/thumbtack-engineering/ai-as-the-next-abstraction-layer-how-i-see-engineering-evolving-at-thumbtack-59e8b1f40686?source=rss----1199c607a13f---4>)

Author: Ananda Kanagaraj Sankar

Published: 2026-05-22T23:53:03Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Thumbtack Engineering - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/thumbtack-engineering-medium.md>)

Topics: [Artificial Intelligence](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/ai.md>), [agentic workflows](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/agentic-workflows.md>), [Development](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/development.md>), [Software Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software-engineering.md>), [engineering-leadership](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/engineering-leadership.md>)

Tags: [agentic-workflows](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/agentic-workflows.md>), [ai](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai.md>), [ai-agent](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ai-agent.md>), [chatgpt](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/chatgpt.md>), [copilot](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/copilot.md>), [development](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/development.md>), [engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering.md>), [engineering-culture](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/engineering-culture.md>), [generative-ai-tools](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/generative-ai-tools.md>), [software-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/software-engineering.md>)

## AI overview

A personal perspective on how AI-assisted development is evolving at Thumbtack, from informal experimentation with ChatGPT and Copilot to end-to-end agentic workflows. The article frames AI as a new abstraction layer and highlights its non-determinism as a major difference from earlier abstractions.

## Source excerpt

Over the past year, the way we use AI at Thumbtack has gone through a few phases. Early on it was mostly curiosity, people experimenting with ChatGPT and Copilot on side projects, sharing tips in Slack. Then the models got noticeably better at working inside real, mature codebases (not just greenfield projects) and the conversation shifted. It stopped being about whether we should adopt AI-assisted development and became about how. Lately, it is moving towards the adoption of end to end agentic workflows for development. I've been thinking a lot about what this shift means, not just for our codebase or our velocity, but how it impacts what it actually feels like to be an engineer here. What follows is my personal perspective, shaped by leading engineering on our monetization teams and informed by how Thumbtack's engineering leadership has been approaching this across teams. Another layer of abstraction If you zoom out, software engineering has always been a story of rising abstraction. We went from assembly to C, from C to Java, from hand-rolled servers to cloud-native infrastructure. And each time, the craft shifted rather than shrinking. For example, managing memory manually was replaced by designing distributed systems. I think AI-assisted development is the next version of that pattern.The difference this time isn't that the new layer takes on implementation work. Compilers always did some of that, with their own undefined behavior and implementation-defined choices. The difference is the leap in non-determinism. The earlier abstractions were designed to be mostly deterministic and mostly non-leaky, and AI tools break that pattern. The same prompt produces different code on different days, with different trade-offs and different bugs -- that's a bigger shift than swapping languages. I keep coming back to the same historical pattern: the engineers who thrive are the ones who can operate at the new layer, not the ones who insist on staying anchored to the old one.