The Exit Code blog covers AI-native engineering, startup velocity, and how small senior teams ship production software.
How to interview an AI engineer: a 90-minute structure — postmortem interrogation, a rigged AI-written code review, and one constraint question — that separates senior AI-native engineers from vibe-coders.
A design engineer is the person who turns design into working, production-grade product — not a prettier Figma file. Here's why the role exists, why the Figma-as-source-of-truth handoff is now the bottleneck, and why early-stage founders should care.
Two years into the AI-native engineering shift, the question isn't how many engineers you need — it's when they formed their intuition about what production software actually requires. A founder's perspective on the distinction that matters.
A 4-layer code review stack — automated gates, AI review, CI guardrails, and focused human review — that lets 2-person engineering teams ship clean code without slowing down or hiring a staff engineer.
A week-by-week playbook for shipping a real, production-ready MVP in six weeks with two AI-native senior engineers — what gets built, what gets cut, and where the leverage actually comes from.
Spec-Driven Development is having a moment, but the discipline isn't new — BDD asked for the same rigor fifteen years ago. What changed is the economics. Here's what that means for the engineers you hire.
The conventional math says AI means smaller teams and lower burn. Here's why that logic fails — and what the right model actually looks like for early-stage startups.
There's a fear circulating in founder circles right now. You've heard about vibe-coding. Here's what actually separates an AI-native engineer from a vibe-coder — and why the distinction matters.