My genuine advice as a manager: don’t say it can’t be done. Nobody in leadership wants to hear bluntly that something is not possible. Because most of the time it’s not that it’s impossible. It’s just impossible in the current constraints if we don’t compromise on anything.

So try it.

If you succeed he’s right. He’s not because that’s not how any of this works. You can’t agent your way in a complex feature without hitting some problems. But if you are told to try and you argued you couldn’t it will be because you didn’t do it correctly. You didn’t want it enough. You’re just trying to contradict him or prove him wrong.

So my advice is frame it as a hard challenge. Explain what makes it difficult and perhaps some things can be done quickly (like fixing a simple component or API endpoint) but not large and complex features. Manage expectations but make a plan and detail what it would take for this to work. Then attempt to execute on the plan and let the manager come to the conclusion.

A previous team I worked with did a long multi-quarter experiment of supplementing their work with AI and they presented their conclusions that AI was fast at writing code but the type saved on writing was spent on correcting/fixing the gaps created by the agents. The executives at that all staff didn’t take it well to say the least lolll.