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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

#61

Post by mzl »

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…

In my view, Scrum is a way to force dysfunctional teams to have some process, it is not useful for a team that is already delivering and working in a samll-a agile manner.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#62

Post by badgersnake »

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

Nah, the rota is large enough that it will likely be somebody else’s problem anyway and the chances are even if it does land on them they just won’t answer the phone.

Punishing mistakes with unpaid overtime has never been a good approach to quality. It just teaches management that they can get away with low quality because the engineers will pick up the pieces in their own time.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#63

Post by fhd2 »

munchbunny wrote: post #27

I generally agree with the take. At the moment the models and agents aren’t good enough for someone who isn’t trained to build and maintain a production system. So as long as Eng isn’t significantly more bandwidth starved than PM, PM’s writing production code is not a high leverage activity. The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experi…

Which would be pretty much full circle at that point. When I started out, it was common for developers to do "product management", there wasn't a specialised role for it yet. You had developers and maybe project managers (generally also developers) and testers, and that was about it. Management would talk to developers about their strategy and problems, and they'd figure out what to build based on that.

I'm pretty weirded out by some "modern" teams where you have product managers spoon feed specifications to developers, and developers focusing on nothing but the code they need to write to do exactly as they've been told.

Product managers are in a weird place. They wear a ton of hats and do entirely different jobs based on where they work. They're often really valuable, but I have some trouble putting my finger on what makes a good one. If they're good at whatever it is they end up doing, that's good.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#64

Post by wiseowise »

maplethorpe wrote: post #21

Hot take: only PMs need to code now. With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful. Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?

Hotter take: why even hire someone at all? Just dial up FOMO and threats, and pile up more work on peons that you own already.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#65

Post by wiseowise »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #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.

Whenever someone says “Fun!!!!” when it comes to LLMs/Claws I can only imagine the author having that obnoxious face: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/soy-boy-face-soyjak

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#66

Post by badgersnake »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #38
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…

My hotter take: All 3 of the engineer, PM and designer will all assume the other 2 are optional, in reality all 3 and the entire company they work for will be optional in most cases.

Good PMs are not optional. Most PMs are.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#68

Post by wiseowise »

dmckinno wrote: post #11
Ronsenshi wrote: post #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.

Weird take. Coding is fun (and has been since before AI). And vibe coding is fun in an entirely different way.

When your only defense is “I’m just having fun!!!!” after dumping your toxic waste in the net, it’s not a weird take.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#69

Post by brailsafe »

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…

Scrum is just one of the early signs for me to start looking for a new job

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#70

Post by croisillon »

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…

same, it sounds more like common sense than spicyness? i vibecode prototypes and visualizations but pushing any more than that would just add chaos to the chaos we're trying to avoid
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