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My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

ddmckinnon.com

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Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#101

Post by alchemism »

sdevonoes wrote: post #86
Bridged7756 wrote: post #33

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claud…

Simply put in your resume that you are a manager? And learn how to vibe code a weather app? Wouldn’t be the first time I “lie” in my CV about my skills (“lie” in quotes because I can learn pretty fast; I know the fundamentals)

Fake It ‘Till You Make It.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#102

Post by bluefirebrand »

jwilliams wrote: post #97

I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping. I love writing software. I love that others are now getting to share this. I think the issues here are valid. Equally there is lots of hard engineering work to reduce these issues. That's where I'm putting more energy. My scale is decidedly non-Meta, but we're investing to make the whole team able to get their own PRs up. It's not been without it's bumps, but o…

> I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping

Yeah man, insisting on good engineering practices instead of "vibes" has always been gatekeeping

That's the actual point of engineering credentials

What are we even doing here

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#103

Post by carschno »

purrcat259 wrote: post #41
650 wrote: post #6

Meta, 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…

An easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota. Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny

There are various technical corrections, with arguable pros and cons. However, they do not match the underlying problem stated above:

> the rise of business types in tech company leadership

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#104

Post by bluefirebrand »

coffeefirst wrote: post #44
ef2k wrote: post #14

My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a…

So… I can do it all. Product manage, code, lead a team, even be my own designer in a pinch. But that’s far too much work and context switching for one person. Someone will try, but the reason you tend to build teams of specialists is to let people focus even when they can do lots of different things.

Ah yes, but now with AI it's going to be easy*

* Not easy at all, but too bad. We worship at the altar of productivity and either you're our blood sacrifice or you're unemployed

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#105

Post by medi8r »

dmckinno wrote: post #10
650 wrote: post #6

Meta, 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).

Quick everyone, create decoy repos for them to vibe in. When the feature doesn't appear "oh feature gate system has an incident try tomorrow". Even better make the decoy repo have an insufferable pipeline that always breaks and get them in a loop trying to fix it. An adveserial "red team" LLM can keep it broken! But tantalizingly with different problems so progress is felt.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#106

Post by DiscourseFan »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #102
jwilliams wrote: post #97

I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping. I love writing software. I love that others are now getting to share this. I think the issues here are valid. Equally there is lots of hard engineering work to reduce these issues. That's where I'm putting more energy. My scale is decidedly non-Meta, but we're investing to make the whole team able to get their own PRs up. It's not been without it's bumps, but o…

> I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping Yeah man, insisting on good engineering practices instead of "vibes" has always been gatekeeping That's the actual point of engineering credentials What are we even doing here

This was before the bot could competently code things. Software development is now a very different beast, and yes while there have been some very stupid and irresponsible uses of this new technology, many others are integrating it effectively into their workflows.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#107

Post by teratron27 »

jwilliams wrote: post #97

I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping. I love writing software. I love that others are now getting to share this. I think the issues here are valid. Equally there is lots of hard engineering work to reduce these issues. That's where I'm putting more energy. My scale is decidedly non-Meta, but we're investing to make the whole team able to get their own PRs up. It's not been without it's bumps, but o…

Is a hiring bar gatekeeping then? Do you just hire the first person that applies because having them do a technical test gatekeeping?

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#108

Post by bluefirebrand »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #106
bluefirebrand wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read takes like this and I feel like it's gatekeeping Yeah man, insisting on good engineering practices instead of "vibes" has always been gatekeeping That's the actual point of engineering credentials What are we even doing here

This was before the bot could competently code things. Software development is now a very different beast, and yes while there have been some very stupid and irresponsible uses of this new technology, many others are integrating it effectively into their workflows.

> This was before the bot could competently code things

Agree to disagree

Getting something working is the absolute bare minimum, it's not "competent"

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#109

Post by jpfromlondon »

ramon156 wrote: post #58
Bridged7756 wrote: post #33

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claud…

I got laid off at a job where this applied, then at another company got rejected because they cancelled the position altogether to use Agentic Coding by Microsoft instead. Then I joined a small consultancy that just lets me build however I want. There's no reviews, no sprint reviews, no evaluation. They trust that you work on what is important. While this is a very messy and unmaintained workflow, it is a lot nicer a…

You're right, but you're going to be inundated with

"but real scrum has never been tried" types.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#110

Post by skydhash »

raviisoccupied wrote: post #9

I 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 o…

Maybe your cool ideas/small optimisations were not addressed because of how they would impact the system as a whole. It's the job of the engineer to keep things running and there are a lot of places that can wreck (slowly of quickly) the product if modified wrong.
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