The Mandate Had No Return Address

The first time I opened Cursor, I used it for ten minutes and shut it down. It felt foreign. The suggestions arrived faster than I could evaluate them. The workflow I'd built over fifteen years wanted no part of it. I closed the laptop, told myself I'd come back when things were less busy, and didn't think much more about it. I recognized the feeling later. Fear of change, dressed up as productivity skepticism. I'd seen it in junior engineers resisting new frameworks. I'd seen it in tech leads protecting workflows that had stopped scaling. I hadn't expected to see it in myself. That moment stayed with me when I started thinking about how to introduce AI to my team at Converse. Because I knew something the people who send mandate emails don't know about themselves: the resistance engineers might feel isn't a character flaw or a performance issue. It's the same thing I felt the first time I sat down with a tool that asked me to change how I think. A mandate doesn't make room for that. Wh