Code Like a Pilot

has made the opposite mistake. They've confused the autopilot's competence with their own. A pilot who hasn't hand-flown an approach in a year doesn't feel rusty. They feel fine. They feel fine right up until the day the automation drops out and their hands don't remember what to do.

The industry has a name for this: automation complacency. That's why regulators stopped treating manual flying as optional. It became mandated, scheduled and checked. Nobody gets to decide they're too senior for the simulator.

Book the simulator

Engineers should have simulator time. Regular, deliberate, slightly uncomfortable practice with the autopilot off. Not as punishment, not as a purity test. As the practice that keeps you qualified to supervise the machine.

There's an important bonus here, too. Aviation doesn't only use the simulator to keep veterans sharp; it's where new pilots learn. Airline pilots often earn their rating on a new aircraft type without ever flying the real one until their first revenue flight, with a training captain in the other seat. The same exercises could be a sustainable way to grow new engineers, who otherwise risk learning to supervise an autopilot before they ever learned to fly.

What that looks like is up for grabs, and it should be. There's no universal syllabus: a startup racing to ship won't look like a bank, and a team of seniors won't need what a team of new grads does. But to make it less abstract, let me throw out some numbers that you can start taking apart:

The startup: one no-assist afternoon every couple of weeks. Review a recent AI-generated PR line by line with the assistant closed, or replay a past incident and debug it by hand.

The well established, more cautious shop: quarterly incident drills with the assistant off, plus a regular no-assist day for routine work.

The team of newbies: every third ticket done without assistance for their first few months, plus pairing with a senior who asks