Most engineering teams I talk to already have the tools. Copilot's expensed, somebody's paying for a Claude subscription too, and there's a Slack channel somewhere full of pasted prompts nobody can find again a month later. A year into all that, almost nobody can tell me whether any of it changed how fast they ship or how good the output actually is.

Sometimes my role is picking the tools. More often it's making them stick.

Generally, this is a few hours a month: architecture review, design calls, unblocking whatever's stuck. Short engagements work too, if you've got one specific problem rather than an ongoing one.