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AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

humanloop.com

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#51
These company blog articles are usually for marketing. Humanloop develops software to assist with prompting during the development process, so the author’s conclusions reflect the company’s intentions more than an objective industry observation.

AI is transforming how we prototype and iterate, and products like v0 or Replit are scratching the surface. However, historically, low-code platforms lacked a good integration with complex development cycles. There were many attempts, but they either failed or shifted their focus: Microsoft Expression Blend had a brilliant concept of integrating early sketching and ideation with development, but the product ultimately died with Silverlight; Framer had an editor that allowed users to integrate React components with a design tool, but they repurposed their product into a CMS-oriented tool like Webflow; Builder.io is following a similar path. It seems that in today’s market, there is no clear fit for the RAD tools of the late 1990s. Maybe AI can change that and create the new equivalent to Visual Basic. The hardest part is the extra mile that goes from the prototype to something robust and complies with multiple quality attributes: scalability, performance, security, maintainability, and testability.

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#54

I've been watching several "vibe coding" vids on the youtubes. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 Some of them are painful. Some are impressive. The projects are small. Sometimes pulling in powerful off-the-shelf modules. They are getting better fast. As a greybeard software architect, my current annoyance is that I'm spending all day talking to people when I want to get some practice voice prompting c…

Whisper.CPP + llama.CPP = what you want??

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#55
Even the words "prompt engineering" make my skin crawl. It goes not require specialized knowledge to input prompts. If this is the crux of the argument in favor of the utility of project management, it is doomed.

Personally I think AI will eat project management long before it eats software development.

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#56

> “No, no,” she said. “Engineers aren’t allowed to edit the prompts. It’s only the PMs and domain experts who do prompt engineering. They do it in a custom UI, and then the prompts are committed to the codebase.” This feels like a desperate power grab. Why can’t engineers be involved with the prompts? Why aren’t they allowed to do things like automated A/B testing or to implement ideas from papers they’ve read? Banni…

"Job security for me but not for thee."

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#57
post #24
post #23

Forget PMs and engineers, the discussion I want to see happening is just how much more easily an LLM could replace the average CEO...

Hey that's a topic I can get behind! 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 that level its more about persuasion and personality than the ability to do the job. High performing CEOs can persuade employees, customers, government, media, investors, suppliers.

LLMs still cannot persuade anybody right now but maybe soon.

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#58
post #32
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey that's a topic I can get behind! 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.

And, at least for one of them, they also tweet all day while somehow being invaluable in providing leadership for like 5 companies. At the same time. I can't even successfully effectively juggle 4-5 _projects_ at a time.

Its pretty simple management style....ask what employee did last week. If you don't like the answer then fire them.

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#59
post #16
post #14

These articles are a little annoying. I love ChatGPT [1]. I use it all the time. I use it for coding, I use it to generate stuff like form letters, I use it for parsing out information from PDFs. Point is, I'm not a luddite with this stuff; I'm perfectly happy to play with and use new tech, including but not limited to AI. Which makes me confident when I say this: Anyone who thinks that AI in its current state is "bl…

Hey Tombert, wrt did you read the article? I was quite specific about the ways I think LLMs are blurring the lines. I don't think its true for general engineering but I do think its true for applications being built with LLMs. Also its still very early

> Also its still very early

“Jam tomorrow” will only get you so far.

Re: AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?

#60

Even the words "prompt engineering" make my skin crawl. It goes not require specialized knowledge to input prompts. If this is the crux of the argument in favor of the utility of project management, it is doomed. Personally I think AI will eat project management long before it eats software development.

I remember a few books were written on the topic when Google started to be popular. We had the same FUD and FOMO, and people were encouraged to read all the books about "Google search engineering." It turns out that writing proper sentences achieved the same results and you could learn how to google in a few hours.
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