One of the biggest misconceptions in AI today is that coding and engineering are the same thing.
When I sat down with Eli Chen, Partner at AI Fund, he made a distinction that completely changed how I think about the future of talent.
Coding, he argues, is rapidly becoming commoditized. AI can already generate software in hours that once took teams of engineers months to build and the cost of writing code is falling towards zero.
Engineering isn’t.
Engineering is the ability to make decisions. It’s choosing architectures, balancing trade-offs, understanding customers, and designing systems that solve real problems. As AI removes the bottleneck of writing code, those human decisions become even more valuable.
What fascinated me most was how this changes company building.
If building an MVP is no longer the hard part, then finding product-market fit becomes the bottleneck. The winners won’t simply build faster but they’ll learn faster. They’ll iterate with customers more quickly, develop stronger product intuition, and cultivate better judgment about where AI genuinely creates value rather than simply adding hype.
Eli believes the founders breaking out today share one defining characteristic: iteration speed.
Not because they work longer hours alone, but because they understand AI deeply enough to make better product decisions. They build constantly, learn constantly, and refine their thinking through first principles rather than assumptions.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from our conversation is that AI isn’t replacing engineers.
It’s raising the bar.
The future belongs to builders who combine technical intuition, product taste, customer empathy, and relentless curiosity. As the cost of creating software approaches zero, the quality of thinking behind it becomes the ultimate competitive advantage.
Until next time,
Firas Sozan
The PMF Playbook