It might just be companies I have worked for in past 25 years, but engineers were virtually always the ones to make sense of whatever vague idea product and UX were trying to make. It's not just code monkey follow the mockup stuff. AI code tools don't really solve that.

This is very accurate to my experience. Product & management dont understand basics and anyone who ever had a manager/pm, you know you had to explain to them the same thing multiple times. Product Managers also struggle to align among themselves and they dont care about future velocity, just current velocity. Then you have programmers who have to basically connect all the things and make sure it doesn't break too much.

Even the upfront solutioning is being disrupted though:

I Built A Team of AI Agents To Perform Business Analysis

https://bettersoftware.uk/2026/01/17/i-built-a-team-of-ai-ag...