On a recent episode of The Product Manager podcast, Cortex CEO Anish Dhar joined host Hannah Clark to challenge a growing narrative: that software engineering is obsolete in the age of AI. His take? Engineering isn’t disappearing, it’s maturing.
At Cortex, we work with some of the most forward-thinking engineering organizations at companies like Canva and Fanatics. What we’re seeing is a shift from focusing purely on developer experience to building systems that tie technical excellence directly to business goals.
According to Anish, "Developer experience is important, but engineering excellence is about aligning technical initiatives with real business outcomes." With change, the way we measure engineering productivity and outcomes needs to evolve too.
From Developer Experience to Engineering Excellence
For years, engineering teams prioritized developer experience: smoother onboarding, more efficient tooling, and faster deploys. These matter, but they are no longer enough. Today, the focus is shifting toward engineering excellence, which means aligning teams like SRE, security, platform, and developer productivity around measurable impact.
That means translating technical initiatives into business outcomes. Whether it’s improving customer experience through more reliable services or accelerating innovation through faster delivery cycles, engineering excellence is about connecting daily work to strategic goals.
A Framework Rooted in Impact
Cortex helps organizations define engineering excellence through three core business outcomes:
Accelerating innovation and time to market
Improving efficiency and reducing costs
Elevating reliability and customer experience
These outcomes are supported by foundational pillars like efficiency, velocity, security, and reliability, measured through both input and output metrics. Underpinning it all are what we call the Four Cs:
Complete visibility into what teams own and how systems are performing
Continuous improvement through clear benchmarks and feedback loops
Consistent developer experience that scales across environments
Clear ownership of services, infrastructure, and outcomes
Internal developer portals, such as those built with Cortex, are a critical layer in enabling this framework. Without visibility and ownership, excellence is hard to scale.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Too often, teams rely on surface-level metrics like lines of code or uncontextualized DORA scores. These can be misleading. What matters more is translating these metrics into real engineering behavior. Anish on measuring what matters, "It’s not enough to just measure deploy frequency and call it a win. Maybe you’re shipping faster, but is the code any good? Does it lead to more incidents? That’s where a 360-degree view is necessary."
It is not enough to measure deploy frequency. Teams need the right conditions, such as guardrails, production readiness checklists, and healthy review processes, to deploy quickly and safely. Productivity does not come from dashboards alone. It comes from making those dashboards meaningful to the people doing the work.
AI and the Limits of “Vibe Coding”
AI tools are transforming engineering workflows, especially when it comes to prototyping and early iteration. But the idea that engineers can "vibe code" their way to production-scale systems is misleading.
Anish stated, "AI will play a huge role in initial development, but enterprises that think they can reduce headcount because of AI are deluding themselves. The more AI-assisted your system is, the harder it becomes to debug and understand. That’s a reliability nightmare waiting to happen.”
AI-assisted development is powerful, but it is not ready to shoulder the complexity of enterprise infrastructure. Without strong visibility and accountability, these tools can increase surface area faster than teams can manage. That is why engineering excellence, and platforms that support it, are more important than ever.
Looking Ahead
As AI continues to reshape how we build, the companies that thrive will be the ones who invest in how they lead. Engineering excellence is not a trend. It is a discipline. It requires clear ownership, cross-team alignment, and the infrastructure to support continuous growth.
Cortex is built to help you get there. If you're focused on building resilient, high-performing engineering teams, join us at IDPCON this October in New York City and connect with leaders who are setting the standard for engineering excellence in the age of AI.
