Thread

The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent

388 points · 240 comments · zazuke

827a · 1790613119 · focus · HN ↗
The future of engineering is product management. I don't believe there is any world left for people whose primary responsibility is opening pull requests; and we're seeing the angst against this happen from both directions. Engineers hate it. Leadership feels they don't need them. The truth is somewhere in the hazy middle; we're just in an uncanny valley right now where neither side can take the leap to cross the valley: the agents aren't good enough yet, and the bigger problem is that there's no job title or corpus of experience leadership can look to and say "Yeah that's the person we need in this role".
The labs saw this early, and thus many roles at the labs are "Member of Technical Staff". That's the future for every software team. You're not a software engineer anymore, but you're also not a PM, nor a designer. Think horizontal slices, not vertical: Every human's responsibility is to leverage AI to be an expert on everything necessary to deliver some vertical slice of the business.
1. whstl · 1790616054 · focus · HN ↗
  > The future of engineering is product management
  Product Managers have been claiming this for years now, but put an AI in front of them and they also just start asking it to do their product management job for them.
  Worst ones I witnessed were just using it to hallucinate tickets. I saw one even fired because of that. Endless mountains of text going absolutely nowhere, both me and the CPO thought we were going insane from reading so much Claude-ish.
  Best one I know used Copilot to code a "Notion to Jira" exporter so it copies requests from business people into Jira. Automated their own work, did nothing else other than monitoring the Python script daily and running ceremonies.
  They can pontificate all they want about taste but: modern apps are all copycats of others, work badly, monetization strategies are spaghetti against the wall...
  Product management will be replaced by AI way sooner than engineers.
  1. 827a · 1790639345 · focus · HN ↗
    Reading comprehension check: I never said product managers would be the new engineers: I said that engineering is becoming product management.

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