In some quarters, there’s a sense that AI has democratized software creation to the point where deep engineering expertise is becoming somehow optional . Vibe coding—in theory, at least—lets anyone describe what they want and watch AI build it. It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Prototyping is faster, junior engineering tasks are more accessible to folks without extensive formal training, and iteration cycles have been compressed. Again in theory, this should give developers more time and mental energy for complex, higher-order work.

But (you knew there would be a “but”), there’s a big difference between building software and running software at scale. AI hasn’t closed that gap. As Braze cofounder and CTO Jon Hyman and Stack Overflow CPTO Jody Bailey discussed on last week’s episode of Leaders of Code , the AI explosion actually makes senior engineering judgment more, not less, valuable.…