Posted by dmckinno 10 hours ago
There’s another path for PMs that the article and most of the comments don’t seem to mention.
Technical PMs are now in a great position to start their own companies. In the past, many were blocked or handicapped by the inability to code. With AI-assisted development, that barrier is much lower, which gives them a lot more leverage to build products themselves.
It's pretty normal for integration projects with big corps to have problems, but if the project has executive interest and the A-team gets called in, it's a joy to work with those people. The lines between the roles are blurred, it's just smart and dynamic people making things work. They don't give a shit about following scrum or pedantic coding standards, only project success, but not in a superficial way. I don't know if they truly care about what they're doing, but they're so far above the baseline that it doesn't really matter.
Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes you have to see it to understand what's wrong / how can it be improved. It's one of the actual benefits of pre-religious agile - have something in front of your sponsor ASAP, adapt to their feedback. This loop can be made faster, but you'll still need some expertise at every level. Just not so many bodies.
Whoever gets the business best (and in detail) will likely be the best builders. It's "intuition as evals" that really matters in the end. You think Software Engineers or Product Managers are replacing Quants at trading shops anytime soon? Nope.
In startups anything goes. PMs and engs do whatever it takes to ship and scale the business. No one cares who's using AI in what way, as long as they're getting shit done.
In a place like Meta or Amazon, people also get more shit done with AI, but because these teams are huge, well-oiled machines, sudden productivity bumps or norm changes can drop overall productivity.
Totally agree with this post as long as it's limited to large, mature teams
But to this sister comment's point, I do think that the dedicated PM role will vanish and the classic BigCo PM will need to look a lot more like the startup one.
I think this is the main takeaway, but I'm curious how bad the PM must have been at communicating to begin with if this is necessary.
I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.
Claw people particularly seem really love to use that word when answering what practical or useful they do with AI agents. It's always something absurdly trivial followed by "and it's just fun!"
Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.
I love coding and it is fun for me. Vibe coding on the other hand - not fun at all. It feels to me like playing slots.
But then again, I never liked gambling.
The most recent models have spooked me into believing this is a thing that is likely to be true at some point, but it ain't true yet.
The general point is that separating PM and eng doesn't make sense any longer. Which subsumes which is an interesting debate.
Your argument that 4.6 Opus makes the engineering skill set useless is totally false and maybe shows you haven't built anything complicated, but it is possible that Opus 5.2 will get there.
Agents would research and identify requirements on their own, observe customer interactions and monitor for trends. Taste.md downloaded via LoveFrom
Coding was never the most valuable skill a software engineer contributed. Socially-capable engineers are going to be far more likely than PMs to 'shine' when agents can write code and engineers are afforded more time to engage with busines/customers/stakeholder/domain experts.
If my experience is any reflection of the norm, the avg PMs greatest value has never come from effectively determining the value or requirement of a product or translating requests/feedback to meaningful deliverables. It's been in providing cover (time) for engineers that could do the same job better, but are irreplaceable in the development process and so are more rare/valuable spending time doing development. When engineers no longer need to write code, they are a more direct line to effectively solving "Product-Led" business needs with technical solutions than a typical PM will be.
Just wait what you pay for the tokens when the enshittification has started and the bubble bursted. In some years you will see that no new engineers are coming along and your products are dying on edge cases that the AI can't handle all together.
Edit: Ok, don't got the sarcasm :D
Is this sarcasm? You don't think there is any utility to understanding code?
Edit: you got me haha.