AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

A PM might generate that SQL thing I mentioned and just blindly cut and paste it. For any application with more than one user, that is a bug, it's incorrect, and it's not like this is some deep cut: upserts happen all over the place.

I didn't finish the entire article, I disagreed with the line, "Prompting Is Here To Stay and PMs—Not Engineers—Are Going to Do It", because I fundamentally do not think that is true unless AI models get considerably better.

It's possible they will, maybe OpenAI will crack AGI or maybe these models will just get a lot better at figuring out your intent or maybe there's another variable that I'm not thinking of that will fix it.

I hate the term "prompt engineer" because I don't think it's engineering, at least not really. I will agree that there's a skill to getting ChatGPT to give you what you want, I think I'm pretty good at it even, but I hesitate to call it engineering because it lacks a lot of "objectivity". I can come up with a "good" prompt that will 90% of the time give me a good answer, but 10% of the time give me utter rubbish, which doesn't really feel like engineering to me.

I saw the line: `As AI models become able to write complex applications end-to-end, the work of an engineer will increasingly start to resemble that of a product manager.`, and while I don't completely disagree, I also don't completely agree either. Even when I heavily abuse ChatGPT for code generation, it doesn't feel at all like I'm barking orders to a human. It might superficially resemble it but I'm not convinced that it's actually that similar.

I hope I'm not coming off as too much of a dick here, I apologize if I am, and obviously a blog post in which you wax philosophical about the implications of new technology is perfectly fine. I think I'm just a bit on edge with this stuff because you get morons like Zuckerberg claiming they'll be able to replace all their junior and mid level engineers with AI soon, and I think that's ridiculous unless they have access to considerably better models than I do.

Most of the big CEOs appear to be CEO of multiple companies (Musk and Bezos come to mind). If you can be the CEO of five different companies, it really doesn't seem like it can be that hard of a job. ChatGPT might be able to do that just fine.

At the end of the day, the stack is collapsing itself, and the lines are blurring because we want people to own the total outcome more often than throwing responsibilities over the wall to each other.

That doesn't mean engineers are going to design, but they should know what a good design looks and feels like. That doesn't mean designers or product should write code, but they should be able to engage in high level architecture discussion to understand the capabilities of their products.

I have not read it yet but there's a book by David Epstein (not that one), "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World". I'm interested because for the last 10 years I've thought of myself as a generalist but always thought companies were looking for specialists. I could show immense value when I got to those companies, but I don't typically think companies are looking for generalist. They are looking for specialists to solve an acute problem.