- I won’t take credit for this insight, but as someone else pointed out, everyone oversimplifies other people’s jobs. To PMs engineers are just code monkeys that they won’t need soon. To engineers, PMs are the guys that manage Jira. Designers are the fussy people that make things look pretty. The reality is all these jobs have intricacies AI absolutely sucks at but those intricacies are lost in the larger discussion.
As a coder though, I’ll point out this is why the “AI solved coding” shit drives me crazy. You only believe that if you don’t know how to code or you have an agenda.
- I think the reality is that these tools are good enough that, to some degree, all three of the roles are correct, everyone is now definitely more able to do others' roles, leadership knows this, and even if there's a period of inefficiency or overwork or lower quality output, there's going to be a drive toward collapsing responsibilities. OpenAI saw this early: Member of Technical Staff. The degree to which this negatively impacts the team or company's output is really a function of (1) how drastically leadership does layoffs, (2) how quickly models and agents continue to improve, and (3) how earnestly leadership can admit mistakes and backfill humans when they realize they've over-fired.
In other words: Yes it will ruin our team.
- I don't know why people are talking so theoretically. This was months ago.
My friends have startups, I know a lot of engineers. The startups have been laying off people for months, and many of my engineer friends don't have jobs anymore.
Teams are already ruined. I just don't think the companies are. In many cases this seems like rational reallocation of capital to AI, and in a VC funded ecosystem you're failing at your job if you're not following the math.
I think you must have a very cushy job if you're still armchair speculating about this.
by toomanyrichies
2 subcomments
- As an engineer and a daily if not hourly user of Claude Code, I would never dream I could do the jobs of my product / designer teammates. Not because I don’t have opinions on product or design, but simply because they do me the huge service of attending meetings so I don’t have to.
I recognize the necessary evil that is Zoom calls and face-to-face time in the larger context of running a business, but I also know what I’m good at and what I’m not. And long, drawn-out “alignment sessions” are not in my wheelhouse. If my PM and design friends are happy to take that bullet for me, I’m happy to let them do so.
- Being a generalist is less fun when you don't have specialist colleagues around to teach you new things and take over the tasks that require actual experience, training, intuition, etc.
by adamtaylor_13
1 subcomments
- This naturally seems to indicate smaller teams will become more normal.
Many of my clients are blown away by what our teams can do with 1 senior engineer now.
Anything below enterprise level software should be thinking very hard about what team composition actually needs to look like to achieve good results. It's likely a lot smaller headcount than it used to be.
- One phrase stuck with me from this: "they'll start to absorb lessons that it took their colleagues decades to learn."
I think the point of failure now will hinge on the willingness of teams to admit what they don't know. The ones that don't won't be saved by Claude.
- I wonder if this could go down similar way some SaaS systems went to lower barrier to customisation so less technical users could do it. For example, having to interface with some ServiceNow instances I often find major flaws with db schema design - similar data in multiple places, lack of constraints, etc. Basically one big mess you are now stuck with that could have been avoided if a db expert was in charge of data model design.
by 1123581321
0 subcomment
- I’m mainly concerned about communication worsening. If a former engineer, designer and PM all want to do the same job now, the results will be fine, excellent, even, but only if they communicate and build together better than they used to. People who only communicated along the lines provided by the design of their role or organization have new skills to learn.
by joeyguerra
0 subcomment
- XP is still a good method to practice, but now with AI.
by AtlasBarfed
0 subcomment
- The class system of business is a warning here.
There used to be hundreds of humans doing math by hand. They were computers. The people that managed those armies of humans were management class.
Then came actual silicon computers. The ones that managed those, despite the fact the value, quality, efficiency, productivity of the systems they now managed dwarfed the old human armies, those people were no longer management. They were labor.
AI will bring a similar effect. These front line "managers" who were already greyarea management, will be labelled "labor".
- The skills list weirdly leaves out “knowing the capabilities and limitations of the tools.” This is non-trivial to say the least.
The roles list also leaves out testing, which seems to me to be the second most important thing (after specifying). This may be because non-testers assume that testing is easy or will be done by the AI. But any testing done by AI is not testing at all, because the effect of real testing is to inform a human of the status of the product based on that human’s empirical investigation. When AI “tests” the humans are being asked to trust instead of investigate.
- Three parallel terminals of coding agents and crosswords magazine until they complete their jobs. Work with real experts and solve real world problems.
- I think it will enhance everyone.
PMs can't develop, since llm development (adding code to whatever the llm initially spat out) still consumes time and effort, but they can now write a PoC without devs and quickly get it up and running without sys ops.
- It already has. Those jobs PM, designer and engineer are all affected and there will not be a need for too many of them for a product feature and will be reduced over time.
While those roles will still exist, there will be a initial shock in people who once believed they were 'valuable' but the business thinks otherwise and does mass layoffs just like Block, because of let's face it; AI.
The way to still remain relevant is to absorb all three roles and build a startup with Claude Code on your side and move rapidly.
- You need to be sociopathic aggressive right now. We are in a few month window here where execs are very confused even if they parrot their group chat talking points to sound smart and ahead of it. They are all behind and they know it.
This isn’t comfortable but now is the time to ship fast and hard. To overstep boundaries and be the person getting attention. In a few months everyone will be so you need to do this now.
Just don’t. Don’t limit yourself. Ask for forgiveness.
by shablulman
0 subcomment
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