My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
ddmckinnon.com
My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
1–10 of 202 posts
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#2[deleted]
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#3I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#4> Why should PMs code? Better communicate the idea/feature
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.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#5> Fun!!!!!
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.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#6Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.
Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#7I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.
You make a better product if you plan it out first. That’s part of a PM’s job so it’s natural fit when the ai does the coding. The code may not be ideal but it’ll have the structure you can improve on.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#8The linked article on evals is even more interesting.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#9I don’t think this is a spicy take at all. A PM’s job is to prioritise, and the most important/high priority projects will naturally be handled by Engineers enabled with AI-coding workflows. The high priority/impact work should be allocated to the folks with the highest level of skill.
I feel like PMs coding unlocks a whole new category of work, mainly addressing the long tail of cool ideas/small optimisations that ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.
And I say this as a PM.
Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
#10Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show other…
Funny story: I work at Meta and posted a version of this internally in response the bizarre pressure and support for PMs landing prod diffs (the response was very positive FWIW).