Jack Rudenko
Partner & Chief AI and Technical Strategist at 10x Labs
Jack Rudenko is Partner and Chief AI Officer at 10x Labs, where he has spent the past two years building the team’s AI-native engineering practice, Magus, from the ground up. He has deep expertise in cloud-native architecture, Go, Kubernetes and complex systems, and has delivered production platforms that would have been considered technically impossible before AI, including a three-system integration project used as a case study on this episode. Jack is also a longtime open-source contributor, including to the Linux kernel.
Career
- Now Partner & Chief AI and Technical Strategist · 10x Labs
- Earlier · Startup Founder · MadAppGang
Sources: player.captivate.fm
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of The Engineer Who Hasn’t Written Code in 9 Months: Jack Rudenko, 10x Labs you want.
- 0:00 Cold open: the line that explains why most AI engineering doesn’t work
- 0:31 Who Jack Rudenko is, and what’s ahead in this episode
- 1:48 The real bottleneck in AI engineering is human, not technical
- 3:36 Why “AI native from scratch” beats bolting AI onto old processes
- 8:53 Inside Magus, treating AI skills like versioned software packages
- 11:20 500 skills later, building a curated knowledge base for AI agents
- 14:56 The rise of the “non-engineering builder”
- 17:06 Why enterprise software is the real mess, not startups
- 19:32 The unexpected cost of working with AI, burnout, not laziness
- 21:24 Jack’s actual workflow, plan mode, research, and acceptance criteria
Connections
In the room with
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
Produced by W2D1 Media
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