There’s a new fear spreading quietly through engineering teams.
It doesn’t look like layoffs or AI doomsday headlines.
It’s subtler — the slow realization that PMs no longer need us to build their ideas.
Vibe-coding platforms change the game.
You describe what you want in natural language — and voilà, an app appears.
A working prototype — with auth, database, API integrations, analytics, and even some polish.
PMs love it.
Engineers hate it.
But where does that hate really come from?
Yeah, engineers will say:
“It generates massive tech debt from day one.”
“Migration to our internal infra will take longer than rewriting it.”
“It’s in TypeScript, we use Java — no match.”
“We can’t expose our internal database to some AI playground.”
All valid. All temporary.
Because the teams behind these platforms are engineers too. They hear you. They’re already fixing those problems.
And when they do, we’ll still hate it.
Because the discomfort isn’t about bad code.
It’s about bad ego.
For decades, we were magicians.
We typed strange incantations, and—boom—something appeared on screen.
PMs wrote specs. Designers made it look nice.
But we? We made it real. The act of creation.
We were the final gatekeepers.
The reason everyone had to wait.
So when a PM said, “Can we test this idea quickly?”
We smirked, opened Jira, and said, “Sure, give us four weeks.”
PMs, of course, were the villains.
They didn’t understand “real engineering.”
They moved too fast.
They ignored edge cases.
They thought happy paths were the only paths.
Meanwhile, we complained about the pressure.
And when our code ended up in the trash, we called it wasted effort.
But here’s the inconvenient truth:
Most of product development isn’t delivery.
It’s a discovery.
It’s not about how beautifully we build something, but whether we should build it at all.
And that’s where we lose the game.
Vibe-coding platforms flip that table.
PMs no longer need us to explore an idea.
They can prototype, test, and throw things away faster than we can finish writing a single RFC.
Ambiguity is no longer their enemy — it’s their playground.
And code — our sacred craft — has become a commodity.
A savvy PM can now drag, drop, prompt, and generate ten prototypes in a day.
No IDEs. No dependency hell. No waiting for “grooming.”
Soon, they’ll drag a slider labeled “production readiness” to 80% and say,
“This one feels enterprise-grade.”
And the worst part? They won’t be entirely wrong.
Does that mean engineers are obsolete?
Of course not.
But the myth of exclusivity is gone.
If we don’t evolve from builders of code to builders of clarity, from executors to true product partners, our future is obvious:
We’ll spend our days porting vibe-coded prototypes into “real infrastructure.”
Yes, it’ll still be technical.
Yes, it’ll still require skill.
But it won’t be creation.
It’ll be translation — clean, scalable, boring translation.
The shift has already started.
You can fight to protect your keyboard.
Or you can redefine your craft.
Because if code is the new clay, then leadership is the hand that shapes it.
And maybe — just maybe — it’s time to sculpt something new.
Food for thought
Here are a few articles exploring the role(s) of engineering in product organization:
And if you look for a guide in the new AI-first reality, check my book: From Engineers to Operators - AI Strategy Workbook for Engineering Leaders
End words
We’re not losing our jobs.
We’re losing our monopoly on creation.
The real question isn’t what AI will build for us —
but whether we’ll find meaning in what’s left for us to build.
Code is not just a commodity - it is a liability, at least production code. You build it - you own it.
So as soon as PMs can do maintenance of the code that AI wrote for them in production, I’m fine with that. But if it remains the sole responsibility of engineers, then engineering will again become the bottleneck and the holders of “exclusivity”.
That said, it’s great when PMs use AI for POCs, demos and prototypes - it explains ideas better than any documentation. But using such solutions as-is in production sounds like a nightmare for those who would need to maintain them over the years.
This isn’t about losing magic, it’s about learning a new kind.