---
title: "Outcomes we want to see from AI at Medium Engineering"
description: "Medium Engineering defines desired outcomes and anti-goals for adopting AI, emphasizing leverage, learning, technical ambition, rigorous reasoning, fluency, and maintainable code rather than raw output. Engineers are expected to use AI for repetitive refactoring, testing, unfamiliar systems, design exploration, code analysis, and safer cross-stack work while retaining accountability for clarity, correctness, coverage, and judgment. The guidance rejects PR, commit, line, token, and model-spend metrics as success measures, allowing them only as debugging signals. It also warns against blind trust, unreviewable code volume, loss of codebase understanding, security or privacy regressions, misaligned vendors, environmental hand-waving, and performative tool adoption. The stated north star is achieving outcomes that let Medium’s humans move with the responsiveness of a much larger team while staying true to what makes the platform worth building."
---

# Outcomes we want to see from AI at Medium Engineering

[Medium](https://yomu.fyi/company/medium) · Jacob Bennett · May 26, 2026

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Medium Engineering defines desired outcomes and anti-goals for adopting AI, emphasizing leverage, learning, technical ambition, rigorous reasoning, fluency, and maintainable code rather than raw output. Engineers are expected to use AI for repetitive refactoring, testing, unfamiliar systems, design exploration, code analysis, and safer cross-stack work while retaining accountability for clarity, correctness, coverage, and judgment. The guidance rejects PR, commit, line, token, and model-spend metrics as success measures, allowing them only as debugging signals. It also warns against blind trust, unreviewable code volume, loss of codebase understanding, security or privacy regressions, misaligned vendors, environmental hand-waving, and performative tool adoption. The stated north star is achieving outcomes that let Medium’s humans move with the responsiveness of a much larger team while staying true to what makes the platform worth building.

## Context

Medium Engineering wants AI adoption to produce meaningful outcomes without sacrificing quality, safety, human accountability, codebase understanding, ethical considerations, or the qualities that make the platform worth building. It explicitly rejects raw activity and spending as measures of successful adoption.

## Approach / What changed

The guidance frames AI as leverage for repetitive work, learning unfamiliar systems, broader technical contribution, rigorous planning, code review, security analysis, refactoring, testing, and design exploration. It retains human responsibility for understanding, reviewing, explaining, and being accountable for AI-assisted code, while discouraging blind trust and cargo-cult tool adoption.

## Takeaways

- AI adoption should be judged by outcomes such as meaningful test coverage, safer refactors, broader technical range, stronger design reasoning, and improved code quality—not by PRs, commits, lines changed, tokens, or model spend.
- Engineers remain accountable for code clarity, correctness, test coverage, and their ability to reason about code, with higher expectations of human understanding for high-risk or complex systems.
- The guidance treats security and privacy regressions, loss of shared codebase understanding, excessive review volume, misaligned vendors, environmental hand-waving, and performative AI usage as explicit anti-goals.

**Tags:** [AI](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai), [AI Governance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ai-governance), [Code Review](https://yomu.fyi/topic/code-review)

- Source: [Medium](https://medium.engineering/outcomes-we-want-to-see-from-ai-at-medium-engineering-10891d52a19f)
- Source URL: https://medium.engineering/outcomes-we-want-to-see-from-ai-at-medium-engineering-10891d52a19f
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-09T16:04:04.556Z

[Read original post](https://medium.engineering/outcomes-we-want-to-see-from-ai-at-medium-engineering-10891d52a19f)