Software engineering is dead. Long live product engineering.

I wrote my first application as a teenager and never stopped. For fifteen years I built software for startups and small companies as a freelance consultant, handling everything from architecture to deployment, every line written by hand.

Two years ago the leads dried up. Clients started vibe coding their own prototypes, budgets evaporated, and the market stopped paying for clean, secure, scalable software. What followed was a real grief, denial and anger included.

Then I stopped fighting the wave and learned to ride it, on my own product first, where no client’s business was at risk. That is where the method was born, one gate at a time: specify, review, verify. The craft survived; it just moved up a level.