I've been watching something shift in the market over the past few months.

Founders who built their MVPs with AI tools — fast, scrappy, no dev team — are now quietly posting senior developer roles. Not because the AI let them down. Because it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

It got them to v1.

And v1 is not a product. It's a prototype with users.

The moment you need to scale, run a security audit, set up a real CI/CD pipeline, or hand the codebase to an engineer — the gap shows up. Fast.

You can't vibe-code your way through a database migration.

You can't prompt your way to production-grade infrastructure.

You can't AI your way into a team that trusts the codebase they're inheriting.

This isn't a dig at AI. It's a reality check on what software actually is.

The developer rebound isn't a surprise. It was always the next chapter.