Presentation: Using AI as a Thinking Partner for Large-Scale Engineering Systems

Julie Qiu explains how AI serves as a "thinking partner" for engineering leaders. She discusses five distinct roles - Archaeologist, Experimenter, Critic, Author, and Reviewer - to manage the cognitive load of 400+ repositories. She shares how AI provides the "RAM" needed to synthesize legacy context, pressure-test designs, and accelerate high-level architectural decisions.