Protecting Production from a VP

Innovation is moving faster than ever. That’s great. With AI code generation accelerating professional developers and the rise of "citizen developers" thanks to tools like vibe-coding, we’re seeing more code written today than ever before. It’s a rush of innovation, but it also creates a massive question for those of us focused on software delivery:

How do we maintain quality and stability when the volume of code and the number of people creating it are skyrocketing?

At a recent EngineeringX meetup, Platform leaders from different organizations shared a common concern: a senior person from “the business” had coded an application and pressured the team to move it into production quickly. This is a tense situation. There’s an unknown risk in the application, but pressure to agree. 

Simply put, you need a way to say "yes" to speed and innovation without saying "yes" to chaos and risk. The conversation on the topic was lively to say the least. 

The Platform Guardrails Protect You (And Your VP)

This is where your Internal Developer Platform becomes the essential safety net. You need a platform that essentially protects your VP from themself, so the app only ships when it’s genuinely safe, regardless of who created it or how powerful they are.

What does that take?

1. Self-Service Boilerplate (A Smart On Ramp)

Make it known within the organization that anyone can use your developer portal to get started. Because we want vibe coders in the line of business to be successful (and governed) we want to offer them easy templates in the portal that will provide them an onramp to creating an app in a way that could actually get out the door.

• Simple templates: Create simple templates that a non-expert can use, requiring little more than a name for the project and maybe the language (or problem space) they’ll be working in. That should be enough for you can provide them the same basic boiler plate and a project that can be wired into the rest of your systems downstream. 
• Flexible Templates: Crucially, your templates must be flexible. This isn't an "all-or-nothing" situation. Your platform team should define the "golden path" (the required security steps and Canary deployment strategy), but give the application teams (even the VPs!) controlled flexibility where it doesn't compromise safety.

2. Automated Governance (The "No, Not Yet" Enforcer)

The old way was to manually add gates, but that just creates friction and toil. The modern approach embeds the rules directly into the system using Automated Governance & Compliance.

• Policy-as-Code is Non-Negotiable: You need a way to define security and compliance requirements as code. This means when the VP's vibe-coded app hits your pipeline, the platform automatically checks that it meets the organization's non-negotiable standards, like a required security scan or an immutable audit trail. If a security scan is skipped? The pipeline stops. The deployment is blocked.

3. Intelligent Verification & Rollback (The Safety Net)

Once an app clears the policy gates, the real test begins: live deployment. You can't rely on a manual "release party" or a chaotic "war room" to verify success.

• Out-of-the-Box Advanced Strategies: The system needs to default to safe deployment models, like Canary or Blue/Green, without requiring a developer to write a thousand lines of script. This is how you make releases less risky. There’s likely no developer involved anyway.
• AI-Powered Safeguards: The platform should analyze live observability data after deployment. Harness, for example, pioneered this with AI Verification & Rollback (originally Continuous Verification). If the new vibe-code app causes an anomaly, like a spike in error rates or a drop in performance, the platform should automatically roll it back to the last working version. No manual intervention needed. This capability protects revenue and brand reputation.

4. Context-Aware Automation (The Expert Assistant)

For the non-technical VP to actually fix their app when the governance rules block it, the platform has to go beyond simply saying "no."

• AI for the Entire Delivery Lifecycle: Just like AI sped up the coding phase, it needs to accelerate the delivery phase. We’re talking about an intelligent solution that understands the context of the user’s environment, their policies, their tools, their workflows—and uses that context-aware intelligence to help fix things. It needs to tell the user why the deployment failed, where the issue is, and even suggest the remediation.

The Takeaway

We need to stop fighting the flood of code and ensure that our delivery infrastructure is able to keep up. While we have some hope that our developers will follow processes and training, the rise of citizen developers will force us to build more pessimistic systems. But that’s probably good anyway. Few of us follow every procedure consistently every time - that just inst’t what people aren’t good at. The challenge isn't the VP writing the code; the challenge is having a legacy pipeline that breaks under the pressure of scale and speed.

The goal isn't to discourage citizen developers. It's to build a modern platform where the checks and balances of enterprise-grade delivery, security, resilience, and governance are built in, not bolted on.

You don't need to try and out-argue a motivated VP. You just need a platform that’s already running a more powerful, more automated, and more intelligent defense system.

Bottom line: The best way to protect production from a powerful non-technical stakeholder is to make the right way to ship software the only possible way. And that takes an intelligent delivery platform.

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