Technical Humility Is the AI Era’s Power Move
- Maryanne
- Aug 17
- 4 min read
Because the smartest person in the room is probably the one asking better questions, not giving longer answers.
The robots didn’t take your job. They just made it glaringly obvious who was faking it.
In the middle of the AI boom, where everyone’s suddenly a prompt engineer and half your backlog is getting “accelerated” by LLMs, one human trait is quietly becoming more valuable than ever: technical humility.
Yes, really. Not speed. Not swagger. Not the ability to memorize obscure Git commands. Humility. The boring-sounding, underhyped, and wildly misunderstood skill that might actually save your engineering team from spiraling into a high-tech version of Lord of the Flies.
What Is Technical Humility, Really?
It’s not about being meek, quiet, or deferring to louder voices. Technical humility means:
You acknowledge what you don’t know.
You stay curious, even when you're the expert.
You’re open to better ideas, even when they come from interns, juniors, or AI.
It’s the dev who asks, “Why does this work?” instead of just copying it. The team lead who says, “I don’t know the answer, but let’s find out together.” The architect who lets go of their perfect design in favor of the one that actually works for the team.
Technical humility is what lets you evolve when the ground is shifting under your feet. And in case you haven’t noticed, the ground is shifting very, very fast.
Why It Matters More in the Age of AI
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI makes it really easy to fake expertise.
Ask a chatbot to scaffold a new service layer, and boom, it looks like you know what you're doing. Paste in some prompts and refactor suggestions, and you’ve got instant velocity. But that’s not engineering. That’s typing with a clever assistant.
Real engineering starts when things get messy, when you hit edge cases, ambiguous requirements, conflicting dependencies. When the AI-generated test passes but you’re not sure why. When the code “works,” but something in your gut says this is gonna bite us in prod.
And that’s when technical humility pays off, because the engineer who admits they’re unsure is the one who double-checks. The team lead who asks for a second opinion catches a bad pattern before it spreads. The junior dev who speaks up about something that “feels off” saves you from six months of rework.
Humility isn’t just polite. It’s protective.
AI Has No Ego—Why Should You?
One of the weirdest things about working with generative AI is how chill it is about being wrong. It’ll confidently generate a broken regex, misquote documentation, and invent non-existent APIs, without a hint of shame. And then it’ll correct itself when you call it out.
Meanwhile, some engineers are still clinging to the idea that being wrong is failure. That changing your mind shows weakness. That asking for help is a junior move.
It’s not.
The engineer who can admit they were wrong, update their mental model, and move forward without spiraling? That’s the one you want leading a team in 2025.
Hiring for Humility: A Leadership Imperative
If you’re leading an engineering team right now, you should be hiring for technical humility as hard as you’re hiring for AI familiarity.
The best AI-driven engineering orgs aren’t filled with rockstars who always “know best.” They’re full of adaptable thinkers who can partner with machines and each other without ego getting in the way.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Code reviews that include the phrase “This part confused me—can we clarify?”
Postmortems where engineers say “I missed that” without fear of judgment.
Feature planning meetings where “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” is a respected answer.
Senior engineers pairing with juniors and learning something. (It happens.)
Humility fosters safety. Safety fosters creativity. Creativity builds better software.
How to Build More Humility Into Your Team Culture
You can’t force humility, but you can design for it. Here’s how:
Model it. Admit what you don’t know. Praise curiosity. Ask questions you already know the answer to, out loud.
Reward thoughtful challenges. Celebrate the junior dev who spots a risk in an AI-generated function. Normalize pushback.
Debrief mistakes without shame. Create a space where engineers can talk about errors without getting defensive.
Stop promoting ego-driven rockstars. If someone’s always “the smartest person in the room,” ask yourself: who else is being silenced?
The more humility you make room for, the better your team handles complexity, ambiguity, and (hello) the chaos of integrating AI into legacy systems.
Closing Thought: Humility Is a Skill, Not a Trait
You’re not born with it. It’s not a personality type. It’s a muscle, one you build every time you choose curiosity over certainty.
In a world where your AI assistant might eventually out-code you, the real value is what you bring to the table that can’t be automated: self-awareness, discernment, collaboration.
So next time you’re tempted to flex your technical chops, try flexing your humility instead. It might just be your most future-proof skill.
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