What Does Engineering Excellence Look Like in the Age of AI? (with Anish Dhar, Co-founder and CEO of Cortex.io)

The Product Manager

The “AI is coming for your job” headlines have been exhausting—especially if you're a software engineer. But as Cortex.io founder Anish Dhar explains, engineering isn’t dying; it's evolving. In this episode, Hannah sits down with Anish to unpack what engineering excellence actually means in 2025, why measuring developer productivity is still wildly misunderstood, and where AI coding tools fit into the real world of production-scale systems. Spoiler: you can’t vibe-code your way to a million users.

Anish draws from his time at Uber and Cortex to break down how engineering leaders can better align technical initiatives to business outcomes, adopt AI without sacrificing code quality, and avoid getting swept up in hype cycles that don’t serve the organization.

Resources from this episode:

• Subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter
• Connect with Anish on LinkedIn and X
• Check out Cortex.io
• IDPCON — in-person event dedicated to Internal Developer Portals

Chapters

1. Engineering in the AI Era (00:00:00)

2. Defining Engineering Excellence (00:09:42)

3. The Four Cs Framework (00:17:41)

4. AI Tools and Production Quality (00:22:13)

5. Input vs Output Metrics (00:22:15)

6. The Reality of Vibe Coding (00:28:27)