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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

#81

Post by latentsea »

nimonian wrote: post #52
dmckinno wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree (as a PM of ~10 years). I think that all PMs will need to get onto the engineering, design, or research ladder. We are already seeing companies eliminate the function here and there and I expect the trend to continue.

This seems crazy to me. I am a PM and I am busier than ever. People are waking up to the idea that code is cheap and things can change faster now, so deciding _what_ to make and prioritise in the deluge of ideas coming to prod is becoming completely essential. One thing LLMs don't have is taste. That's on me.

They don't seem to have taste when it comes to engineering either, but tbh 'taste' is a computable function, and will eventually be learned.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#82

Post by fifticon »

I am glad this essay was on the right side of the fence, otherwise I would have written it myself in response.. Our company is currently one of countless, where we just had a "get with the program" meeting with our PMs, where they showcased stuff they had added to our enterprise system in hours and days, and told us that they expected us to start delivering with the same tools techniques and speed.. Meanwhile, my team had spent that same working day before that meeting, trying to figure out why our production databases were suddenly getting hammered; it turned out some system was suddenly calling an expensive query endpoint 10k (10.000) times each hour, during business hours. Guess 3 times whose vibe-coding adventures were responsible for those 10k calls :-/.

Other than that, I noticed during the meeting, that their vibe-coded demo added module to our enterprise system only dealt with happy-path of the data updates, but would leave debris in our database for all the edge cases. Happy times. But heck yeah, let's just ram it straight into production. I wonder who will take care of adding support/clean up for the edge cases.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#83

Post by nevertoolate »

I agree - we should use the tools. But we should be mindful about how humans actually learn.

Some improvement ideas:

A prototype can help in the “Better communicate the idea/feature” part but it is even better if you let engineers do this as learning by doing is better than just being shown the result.

Vibe coding doesn’t help in “Understand the systems” - on the contrary, this is already a well known fact that vibecoding has negative effect in understanding the underlying system. It should be hardboiled documentation reading, trial and error which helps, otherwise you get only the illusion of competence.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#84

Post by romanovcode »

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?

Most seniors are hired for their code readability and real-life experiences with real products and problems. Not for code writing ability.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#85

Post by neonstatic »

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.

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#86

Post by sdevonoes »

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)

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#88

Post by polotics »

keeda wrote: post #55

A friend at Meta -- long before the age of LLMs -- got paged at 3am for a site issue. When he found the PR that caused the bug, the testing section for the change simply said: YOLO! This was well into the "Move fast with stable infra" era of Meta, but clearly that still encouraged "Move fast and break things" for everything beyond infra. PMs landing Prod diffs sounds like even more moving fast shall ensue.

The quip "move things and break fast" is from which year btw, do you remember?

Re: My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

#90

Post by tl2do »

With AI coding agents, reverse-engineering a codebase into a spec doc has become much more feasible, including details below the usual spec level. That gives PMs a practical way to understand systems more deeply than before, without having to land production diffs themselves. So to "Why should PMs code?" my take is: sometimes they should, but now there are multiple levels of involvement depending on what understanding is needed.
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