AI coding, vibe coding and agentic swarm have made a dramatic and astonishing recent market entrance, with the AI Code Tools market valued at $4.8 billion and expected to grow at a 23% annual rate. Enterprises are grappling with AI coding agents and what do about expensive human coders. They don’t lack for advice. OpenAI’s CEO estimates that AI can perform over 50% of what human engineers can do. Six months ago, Anthropic’s CEO said that AI would write 90% of code in six months. Meta’s CEO said he believes AI will replace mid-level engineers “soon.” Judging by recent tech layoffs, it seems many executives are embracing that advice.Software engineers and data scientists are among the most expensive salary lines at many companies, and business and technology leaders may be tempted to replace them with AI. However, recent high-profile failures demonstrate that engineers and their expertise remain valuable, even as AI continues to make impressive advances.SaaStr disasterJason Lemkin, a tech entrepreneur and founder of the SaaS community SaaStr, has been vibe coding a SaaS networking app and live-tweeting his experience. About a week into his adventure, he admitted to his audience that something was going very wrong. The AI deleted his production database despite his request for a “code and action freeze.” This is the kind of mistake no experienced (or even semi-experienced) engineer would make.If you have ever worked in a professional coding environment, you know to split your development environment from production. Junior engineers are given full access to the development environment (it’s crucial for productivity), but access to production is given on a limited need-to-have basis to a few of the most trusted senior engineers. The reason for restricted access is precisely for this use case: To prevent a junior engineer from accidentally taking down production. In fact, Lemkin made two mistakes. First: for something as critical as production, access to unreliable actors is just never granted (we don’t rely on asking a junior engineer or AI nicely). Second, he never separated development from production. In a subsequent public conversation on LinkedIn, Lemkin, who holds a Stanford Executive MBA and Berkeley JD, admitted that he was not aware of the best practice of splitting development and production databases.The takeaway for business leaders is that standard software engineering best practices still apply. We should incorporate at least the same safety constraints for AI as we do for junior engineers. Arguably, we should go beyond that and treat AI slightly adversarially: There are reports that, like HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the AI might try to break out of its sandbox environment to accomplish a task. With more vibe coding, having experienced engineers who understand how complex software systems work and can implement the proper guardr …
