AI in NYC: How Tenex Builds an AI-Native Engineering Team — Alex Lieberman & CJ Hess

How do you organize an engineering team when AI agents can do more of the implementation? Alex Lieberman and CJ Hess of Tenex join swyx at AI Engineer New York to discuss paying for outcomes, the MetaHarness process, enterprise AI adoption, and where AI-built software can—and cannot—replace SaaS. They explain how Tenex keeps plans, project context and decisions in version control, discuss what gets in the way of deploying agents in companies, and debate the economics of rebuilding software. They also consider the consequences for workers and New York’s AI ecosystem. Chapters: 00:00 Cold open 00:16 Title sequence 00:26 Introductions 00:51 What Tenex does 01:32 Why CJ joined Tenex 03:17 Paying engineers for outcomes 07:20 Inside MetaHarness 10:25 Models and long-running tasks 15:11 Token spending and ROI 19:29 The enterprise AI adoption gap 23:22 Why agent deployment is hard 24:42 Vertical AI and enterprise software 30:32 Kill My SaaS 35:23 AI and jobs 38:18 New York’s AI ecosystem 42:28 Hiring at Tenex Links: Tenex’s AI-native SDLC: tenex.co/blog/building-an-ai-native-sdlc Tenex AI engineering: tenex.co/ai-engineering Kill My SaaS results: youtube.com/watch?v=zlD-CkLVKtU AI Engineer NYC keynote: ai.engineer/nyc/2026/talks/welcome-back-13 Sponsorship and business inquiries: business@latent.space