Gil Feig, CTO of Merge, reflects on why company leaders must personally code with AI tools like Windsurf and Claude Code rather than delegating entirely to engineering teams.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gil Feig: Custom agent harnesses and workflow builders will become obsolete very soon
“You see a lot of people trying to build, like, a custom harness, or, You know use something like a workflow builder to build agents that are repeatable and all of that. And I just ultimately think none of it matters because we're almost at the point now where …”
Insight
Feig: AI agents cannot be trusted without hard data-leak guardrails
“We don't trust agents. We say, Hey, we can try to set rules, but there needs to be hard guardrails and blocks for things like sensitive data being sent across.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Feig: AI Startups Raising at 100x–1,000x Multiples Will Face Failure and Layoffs
“We know specifically, like we know the numbers, we know sales figures for some of these companies raising at Hundreds of millions to billions, and again, we're looking at thousand x to, you know, hundred to thousand x multipliers, like, a lot of these companie…”
Insight
Feig: AI Coding Tools Shift Hiring Toward High-Agency 'Barrels'
“It used to be that, you know, a team that had a barrel of a PM or a manager and a bunch of ammunition could get a lot done, But now that you kind of can have one person just go use, you know, Codex, Cloud Code, whatever, to go build something, you really just …”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jun 2031
Feig: Open-source supply chain attacks will surge as AI agents flood pull requests
“Agents are pushing a ton of code. You don't have enough humans to read all that code, and so things are slipping by, things are getting in, and one of them was a vulnerability that gets injected into an open source package that everybody relies on and uses, an…”
Disclosure
Feig: Merge screens candidates for AI enthusiasm rather than advanced tool usage
“We ask about it in the interview process. So what we're not looking for is I use the latest cutting edge, but we're looking for, you know, hey, I use it to code sometimes. My company doesn't let me use it to do all these things, but I really want to. That's wh…”