Negotiating the AI-era comp conversation

Comp conversations have always been about leverage, and AI quietly rewrote where leverage sits. Raw output is cheaper than it was; judgment, trust, and the ability to ship reliable AI features are scarcer. If you walk into the conversation with the old story, you'll undersell the new value you create.

Find what got scarce

Ask yourself what your team can't easily get more of. It's rarely lines of code now. It's the person who can define an eval the org trusts, who owns the AI feature nobody else will touch, who keeps the thing reliable at 2am. Name your contribution in those terms, with specifics, and you're negotiating from leverage instead of tenure.

Bring evidence, not adjectives

"I work hard" is invisible. "I shipped the eval suite the team now gates releases on, cut our inference cost by a third, and own the retrieval pipeline three other teams depend on" is a case. Keep a running log of outcomes through the year so the conversation writes itself.

Know your walk-away — and your market

Leverage you can't act on isn't leverage. Quietly understand what your skills command elsewhere before the meeting; a grounded sense of your options changes how you carry yourself more than any script. You're not threatening to leave — you're negotiating from a clear-eyed view of your alternatives.

The engineers who do well in this market aren't necessarily the loudest. They're the ones who can articulate, calmly and specifically, why the scarce thing they do is worth more than it was a year ago.