My answer is no. And I don't think it's even the right question.

Vibe coders are building fantastic products. They're turning ideas into profitable apps at a pace that traditional development cycles can't touch. That creativity and speed should be celebrated, not gatekept. Some of the most interesting software I've seen this year came from people who would never call themselves engineers — they just had a clear idea and an AI willing to help them build it.

So the framing of "engineers vs. vibe coders" gets it wrong from the start. It assumes a fixed pie and two groups fighting over it. What's actually happening is that the pie got bigger. More people can build, more ideas get tried, and more of those ideas reach real users. That's good for everyone who cares about software existing.

Speed gets you to the wall faster

But eventually those apps need to scale. And scaling brings a whole new set of requirements — the unglamorous infrastructure that doesn't show up in a weekend build but absolutely shows up the first time you have real customers and real money moving:

  • Security: 2FA, social-media authentication, Face ID
  • Feature and usage management
  • User management
  • API key protection
  • An AI proxy with the latest agents
  • AI Skills and MCP servers
  • Email and SMS
  • Credit card payments
  • Protected API connections that can be wrapped as MCP servers
  • And analytics across all of it

That's a lot of infrastructure, and it's where most vibe-coded apps hit a wall. The MVP that took a weekend can take months to harden — not because the original builder did anything wrong, but because production-grade plumbing is genuinely hard, genuinely important, and genuinely boring to build for the fifth time. It's also exactly the layer where a mistake costs you a breach, a chargeback dispute, or a 3 a.m. outage.

Embrace and extend

My philosophy is to embrace and extend, not to compete. The people building fast shouldn't have to slow down to a crawl the moment they need real auth or real billing — and the engineers who know how to build that layer shouldn't treat it as a moat to defend.

That's exactly why I'm building Wildwood. It's a backend-as-a-service platform that gives vibe coders one place to plug into all of that infrastructure without needing to build it themselves — authentication, payments, subscriptions, AI proxying, MCP wrapping, and analytics, as components you drop into your own app. But it's not just for solo builders. Wildwood has the depth to appeal to IT teams and small businesses too, who want the same components without standing up a backend from scratch.

And the cherry on top: a Claude plugin with skills and MCP server tenant access to the Wildwood API, so an AI agent can set the whole thing up for you. The same vibe-coding workflow that built the app can wire up its production backend.

Where engineers actually fit

So no, I don't think engineers are competing with vibe coders — we're the layer that lets vibe-coded products grow up. The judgment about how to structure a system for scale, where the security boundaries belong, and how to make AI features reliable instead of merely impressive: that's the work, and it's more valuable now, not less, because there's so much more software reaching the point where it needs that judgment.

That's the work I do at Kuhn Consulting — SaaS architecture and AI integration for products that need to go from "it works" to "it scales." If you've built something that's outgrowing its weekend foundation, let's talk about what comes next.