Software Engineers are in Demand Again & Stripe Buys OpenRouter for $7B

Martin, Colin, and Christian are back after a short break to break down Stripe's $7B acquisition of OpenRouter, and why a payments company wanted a model router in the first place. Colin digs into OpenRouter founder Alex Atallah's track record (he sold OpenSea near its peak too), and the three debate whether Stripe is trying to get closer to the agentic economy before agents become the primary users of software.

Then the conversation shifts to something Lattice has been seeing firsthand in client interviews. Non-technical employees are vibe coding tools that have become critical to their day-to-day work, sometimes five different people at the same company independently building the same thing. They talk through what that means for engineering hiring (up, not down), why "PM-engineer" might be the highest-demand role right now, and the strange position companies land in when an intern's side project becomes infrastructure nobody else knows how to maintain.