It’s actually outreach and business development but yeah it’s not coding or product development anymore. Why? because AI makes it easier to make credible sounding stuff, to maintain the appearance of progress, making it harder to tell who’s the real deal. So everyone is drowning in spammish AI. We all see it in recruiting (in all directions), it’s happening too in sales.
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
LLMs are trained to write out sequences of words by mapping previous writing. So it’s recycling prior statements. There is no process/tech/innovation to train a system to engage in the world and figure out how things work.
So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).
It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers"
"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"
Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
I have worked with a few PMs that have been significant helps to my job but LLMs have completely destroyed my ability to work with them. "Oh I asked an AI to put together a demo for this idea and I presented it to leadership. When can you have it finished?" This is now a constant refrain, with LLMs seemingly convincing every PM I know that it is trivial to put together a reliable and maintainable system. "Oh let's just launch this and we'll fast follow with the maintainable infrastructure" and I want to blow my brains out.
> never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
I have had a bad time with PMs and UX designers not actually understanding how the product works _right now_. How can you ask for changes if you don't understand how it works currently?
Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
I imagine the folks in the article and others like it are not building libraries and foundational infrastructure but rather cranking out SaaS startup ideas and CRUD web apps. I find that kind of coding really can go quite fast using AI, particularly if you are building it from zero and not worrying about all the existing quirks of a large codebase or creating technical debt.
I'd like AI to be the product management layer of the client/mgmt/engineer sandwich as then it has two sets of humans checking the work that are already used to managing around miscommunication. Letting AI do the JIRA work seems like a perfect fit.
Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shoveling bullshit for anyone who pays him.
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"?
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
These days, most software startups with good ideas should be self-funded. Develop the software and figure out your outreach and marketing. Reap the profits. You don't need paper-pushing PMs. If you are seeking funding for a software startup, to me it's a red flag that your idea is probably bad, that you're just taking VCs for a ride.
It doesn't matter what knowledge based industry it is either, its always people, communication and decision making (or lack of) that makes everything take longer.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff.
If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)
If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
- in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together)
- in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.
He is completely correct in principle, as most of the AI startups I have crossed paths with (I do some investment advisory) keep throwing AI at the wrong problems and/or don’t know how to mine for value in a product concept.
> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
There's that word "just".
There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)
I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work.
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
I have worked in large companies with dedicated PM roles and mostly had a pleasant experience. Except a few instances with "real alpha male" energy who wanted me to explain myself. Fortunately this was over Zoom so I explained the problem (I had caused it) and then exited the call. Feature ultimately got delivered, was used and so I was promoted.
These people make me hate working. They don't want to pair with anyone. Understanding work at all is anathema to them. Their brains are too large for such trivial matters.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] thread"AI has made coding the easy part."
"Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.
On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense).
It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
"GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product"
Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
I have a couple times, but they didn't have an MBA. Unfortunately though if you have an incompetent C suite or board, it's hard to get anything meaningful done no matter how good the team under them is.
Like I am saying how the current behavior of the app downright needs a big flowchart to explain and I get asked: "Add X, but keep it working for all existing users" when that means the whole freaking flowcharts needs to be redrawn from scratch. When I suggest to remove some things to make things simpler (because the users don't understand it either) I get denied because it would be too much hassle to communicate the changes.
If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality.
Neither of those is happening.
The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
Hardware startups could still use funding.
Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy.
On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group.
I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees.
Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)
If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
- in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together) - in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.
There's that word "just".
There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?)
I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.