There’s a line going around right now that captures something real: the question is no longer whether founders can vibe code. They can. Anyone can. AI has made writing code the easy part of building a product.
But that’s exactly why it’s worth pausing on what got harder instead.
When execution was expensive, bad decisions were self-limiting – if you picked the wrong architecture or built the wrong feature, the cost of actually building it slowed you down enough to notice before it compounded. That friction is gone now. A founder can go from idea to working prototype in an afternoon. Which means a founder can also go from small problems to fully built problems in an afternoon, and from there straight into production, into customers’ hands, into the foundation the next six months get built on top of.
Speed didn’t remove the need for good judgment. It removed the checkpoint that used to help.
This is where experience earns its keep – because knowing, before you build, which decisions are cheap to get wrong and which ones aren’t.
An experienced engineer has usually already been burned by the wrong answer to that question once. They know enough to know, if this is wrong or ignored, what’s the potential for damage?
It’s also why “AI wrote it” was never going to be the end of the story. The code AI generates is only as good as the decisions and feedback that are guiding it.
The experience to know what to ask for, what to accept, what to push back on, what to rebuild properly before there is a future break point. That’s a skill built by having made (and cleaned up) those calls before, not by prompting faster.
None of this is an argument against moving fast or against AI-assisted building – it’s an argument for knowing the difference between the parts of your product where speed is free and the parts where it’s financed on credit. Most founders can’t tell those apart yet, because they haven’t had the years of hands-on experience that teach you where software actually breaks under real users, real scale, and real scrutiny.
That’s the gap we spend most of our time closing at Ten24: not writing code faster than AI can, but bringing the judgment that decides what’s worth building carefully in the first place – so the speed AI ends up giving you something durable, instead of a crash at the next traffic spike, customer onboarding or security review.
Experience and judgement create the moat.
Learn more about building software and launching products with our Guided AI approach.
