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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

#141

Post by jonpurdy »

geooff_ wrote: post #135

One thing missing from this discussion is the blast radius of the product or repo in question. Let PMs land new widgets on internal dashboards or CSS changes in internal tooling. The same way we should be aspiring to build tools for devs to merge these same changes with minimal test plans. You wouldn't call a mechanic to help you turn on your windshield wipers. Changes in high-risk environments should be gated for pe…

100% agreed. I'm a Program Manager and have been writing tooling for my own internal workflows for years (like Monte Carlo-based forecasting tools), or program-adjacent low-stakes stuff (like an API to generate a WSJF score based on a fields inputted into Asana, since it couldn't do that itself).

But I'm not about to send a PR for fixing production bugs even if I have decent high level context. Nobody has better context than the devs working on it every day.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#142

Post by boondongle »

foolserrandboy wrote: post #114
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…

Isn’t this the type of work interns used to do? Prototype hackathon type things?

In a real, large company, no. Interns generally still get the work that is prioritized but often too simplistic to spend Senior Dev time on to simplify Dev's job. For better or worse, Development represents what the executive level prioritizes often defined by Product Management/Program Management.

There's a whole other level of requests which for political or cultural reasons don't get touched even if there's a great internal rate of return to them or they reflect real bottlenecks elsewhere in the company.

Ideally any/every company would prioritize by actual internal rate of return but that's just not what most of us observe.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#143

Post by bonecrusher2102 »

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…

Agree. Also as a PM, one of the most important things you can do, once you've decided or understood "this is the most important thing we can be working on," is to sell that vision internally so you have high alignment and thus can move fast with shipping (i.e. Sales, Marketing, Legal et al are all on board and ready to help you get to market).

SHOWING internal folks something is always more compelling than words on a slide. So if you have good alignment with your Engineering team that the thing is possible, you can go off on your own and vibe-code something to garner internal alignment... and then throw it away and let your Engineers build the real thing. And they won't have to spend extra time on a PoC that's only meant to show off internally.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#144

Post by kekqqq »

wiseowise wrote: post #60
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…

Using just one $200 Claude subscription? What is that? 2024? Managers? Get on my level, son. It’ll be one man unicorns, new breed of CEOs running army of openclaws. I’ll have you fucking know that I’ve just launched “build me a next unicorn” prompt and 1000 agents have been running nonstop for a week. See me at the top of the AngelList, chump. Though I’ve probably won’t see you while you collect your unemployment che…

> Get on my level, son. It’ll be one man unicorns, new breed of CEOs running army of openclaws. I’ll have you fucking know that I’ve just launched “build me a next unicorn” prompt and 1000 agents have been running nonstop for a week.

Woah, what is that 2026? Emulating the economy using human flesh is obsolete. Just emulate the entire C-suite with the fleet of agents in the latent space of LLMs running on the orbital datacenters, powered by the same solar energy that used to keep humans warm.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#145

Post by dasil003 »

neonstatic wrote: post #85
dasil003 wrote: post #56

As much as I recognize that a truly talented product manager is worth their weight in gold, I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. PM vibe coding a prototype for demonstration purposes? Might be a better use of a designer or engineers time, but okay I could see it being valuable. PM vibe coding something to ship to production? Your title is now enginee…

> I'd say the average engineer would be much more capable of learning to be an average PM than vice versa. It's a completely different skillset. Practice shows, that most Engineers simply do not want to be PMs or find out about that after making the change and regretting it.

I agree but my point stands, even if they don’t want to, an engineer at least has the precision of thought to specify how a product could work. Many PMs simply don’t have this, so asking them to become vibe coders is a hopeless waste of time.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#146

Post by justonceokay »

carschno wrote: post #103
purrcat259 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact that they are PMs is a tragedy of circumstance, not a moral failing. If they are willing to go on-call for their work they will lose that childlike innocence and become engineers very quickly.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#147

Post by HardCodedBias »

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…

"This is the end of software engineering."

Likely. The models have to improve, but the trend has been strong.

I have the misfortune to be required to use Gemini at Google, so I am not seeing it as clearly as others, but indeed the trend seems real.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#148

Post by game_the0ry »

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…

> Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.

Leadership will cherry pick metrics that are easy to game so they can make the next promo, and do say at the expense of company resources. This is a problem in every big corp not just tech.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#149

Post by gedy »

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…

Maybe, but why have (frankly not that intelligent/logical) PMs doing dev work vs the dev/eng types being the PMs with AI help?

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#150

Post by gedy »

zombot wrote: post #134
intelVISA wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this is satire, or marketing, but I'll engage: in this scenario how is the SaaS generating millions if anyone can just prompt their own?

Apparently it never occurs to the Believers to ask this exact question. They will pay an expensive subscription to vibe-earn money without working.

One of my LinkedIn connections is at a place where the leadership brags about how easy it is to prompt their features. I'm like: are you f-ing stupid?
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