Gen AI in the SDLC Is Infrastructure Now,And Every One of Your Engineers Picked Their Own

Gen AI in the SDLC is now infrastructure, not innovation. But every engineer picked their own stack. Here’s why that’s a governance problem.

Your principal engineers are submitting procurement requests for every AI coding tool on the market. One wants the CLI tool. Another wants the VS Code fork. Someone else swears the web-based IDE is the future. And Carl is building his own from scratch. You’re stalling on all of them because your CISO and Legal team have no idea any of this is happening,a bottleneck that’s costing you more than you realize,and if they find out, they’ll shut it all down. Meanwhile, your college roommate who sold his startup keeps telling you: pick a platform that will grow with your team into 2028 without betting your market share on a VC-funded company that hasn’t existed as long as that office sublease you’re stuck with that sits empty every day since COVID. If that hot startup becomes the winner by 2028, your board will understand when you pivot then. But they won’t forgive you for risking the company on unproven infrastructure today.