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AI is blurring the line between PMs and engineers?
- hexator 2y agoThe title of this article seems out of touch with reality. This entire article is a thoughtless fluff-piece that reads more like an advertisement. It's not fit for HN.
- razcle 2y agoHi Hexator, OP here. Thanks for the (harsh!) feedback, I'll take it in a growth mindset. The post does genuinely reflect my experiences and I do believe what I said.How would you advise I change the post to make it better? Which parts do you think are untrue? Thanks!
- swesour 2y ago[flagged]
- ryeguy_24 2y agoYour article starts off with a grand proclamation that isn't true in most cases. Then you talk about how anyone can prompt an LLM. Most of HN already knows that engineers aren't needed to prompt an LLM. Then you state: "By allowing non-technical people and domain experts to use English as the programming language, AI blurs the line between specification and implementation." This is a non sequitur. You are saying that some PMs can update the prompts for an AI application. But it does not follow that AI can now specify and implement software. If you are talking about specifically "LLM Applications that just pre-prompt a model can be updated by a PM instead of an engineer". Then yes, that I would agree with. But you've extrapolated this wildly and close out with marketing for your tool.
- razcle 2y agoOk I think I need to go into more depth on the examples. I think HN knows that anyone can prompt LLMs. I do think its interesting though that this has allowed PMs/SMEs to direclty influence products that are deployed to millions of people. That seems genuinely novel. Maybe I over egged it
- ryeguy_24 2y agoAgree.
- yadaeno 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- the_duke 2y agoNote what's on the frontpage of the homepage: > LLMs break traditional software development > Develop your Prompts and Agents in code or UI ... So of course the blog post is an ad, peddling what they want potential customers to think. I don't doubt that we'll eventually come to a point where most code is written by AI, but that point is not at all where we are at right now, and for quite a while we'll need developers to drive the development process.
- razcle 2y agoHi, I totally agree that we're not at a point where AI can write most code. Though, I didn't ever say that. I just think its blurring the boundary between engineers and PMs with both taking on more of the others role. Also, it shouldn't be surprising that the product we're building is aligned with what we believe about the world :) R
- ryeguy_24 2y agoI mean...maybe. The title should be "Engineers are not needed for prompting LLMs"? Yes, LLMs can write code. But I don't think they are at the level yet to build and maintain complex and high-stakes systems with a few prompts.
- razcle 2y agoI agree with that. What do you think about the point thought that for LLM agents and applications, prompts and tool definitions might matter more than code?
- bufferoverflow 2y agoPMs (generally) can't tell if AI wrote bad code.
- djohnston 2y agoI’m SWE on a product and generally agree with this, at least for user-facing prompts. Once you’re walking an LLM thru OOXML it’s better done directly by ENG. For tools, not clear how this works since as you adjust parameters and whatnot you’re also presumably changing the code downstream when you “execute the call”. But probably both sides of this will be done by LLMs directly in the future. I rarely write or tune prompts by hand now.
- tombert 2y agoThese 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 "blurring the line between PMs and Engineers" doesn't know what they are talking about. ChatGPT is definitely very useful, but it's nowhere near a replacement for an engineer. ChatGPT is really only useful if you already kind of know what you want. Like, if I asked it "I have a table with the columns name (a string), age (an integer), location (string), can you write me an upsert statement for Postgres for the values 'tom', 34, 'new york'?". This will likely give you exactly what you want, will give you the proper "ON CONFLICT" command, and it's cool and useful. If I ask it "I want to put a value into a table. I also want to make sure that if there's a value in there, we don't just put the value in there, but instead we get the value, update it, and then put the new value back in", it's not as guaranteed to be correct. It might give you the upsert command, but it also might fetch the value from the database, check if it exists, and if it doesn't do an "insert" and if it does do an "update", which is likely incorrect because you risk race conditions. My point is, the first example required knowing what an upsert is, and how to word it in a technical and precise way. It certainly doesn't "blur the line" between PM and engineer for me. I have to pretty heavily modify and babysit its outputs, even when it is giving me useful stuff. You might be saying "well that's what a PM does!!", but not really; project managers aren't typically involved in the technical minutia of a project in my experience, they're not going to correct me for using the wrong kind of upsert. These kinds of articles always seem to be operating on a theoretical "what if AIs could do this??" plane of existence. [1] Deepseek is cool too, what I'm saying applies to that as well. ETA: Even if I wasn't a fan, this article definitely shouldn't have been flagged.
- razcle 2y agoHey 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
- develoopest 2y agoWishing the best to my PM, who struggles to write a ticket title.
- ryandvm 2y agoForget PMs and engineers, the discussion I want to see happening is just how much more easily an LLM could replace the average CEO...
- tombert 2y agoHey 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.
- amarcheschi 2y agoThey just work harder and deserve to rule over humanity, nothing to be worried about
- apercu 2y agoAnd, 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.
- mlboss 2y agoIts pretty simple management style....ask what employee did last week. If you don't like the answer then fire them.
- Aurornis 2y ago> Most of the big CEOs appear to be CEO of multiple companies (Musk and Bezos come to mind). Most big CEOs are definitely not in charge of multiple companies. You hear about Musk and Bezos because they’re all over the news, but they’re all over the news because they’re not normal CEOs. It’s well known that Musk’s relationship to his companies is primarily one of ownership and delegation. Bezos hasn’t been in charge of Amazon for a long time but people conveniently forget that at every opportunity. > it really doesn't seem like it can be that hard of a job. It’s funny how often I hear this about AI replacing jobs, with one exception: Everyone who repeats it is highly confident that AI can replace other jobs but once you get to the work they do they’ll stop and explain why it’s actually much harder than you think.
- christopherslee 2y agoI've enjoyed, and been lucky to work at companies where engineers are focused on customer outcomes. I would also cite Hiten Shah's engineering driven development: https://www.june.so/blog/the-rise-of-engineering-driven-development-edd https://www.june.so/blog/the-rise-of-engineering-driven-deve... 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.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoA joke: Good PMs will do invisible work. Bad PMs are just invisible.
- margalabargala 2y agoAs anyone who has worked with a bad PM can tell you, they are anything but invisible.
- corysama 2y agoI've been watching several "vibe coding" vids on the youtubes. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 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 code :P
- jfbfkdnxbdkdb 2y agoWhisper.CPP + llama.CPP = what you want??
- viccis 2y agoI'm fortunate to work for a company with great PMs at the moment, but in the past, it's usually been the case that PMs blur the line between PMs and engineers by making us do their job for them. That they can use AI to appear productive is not a promising development.
- marcusestes 2y agoAbsolutely agree with this observation. And I think it’s a great outcome. The vibe coding Reddit (http://reddit.com/r/vibecoding http://reddit.com/r/vibecoding) already contains the full spectrum of “first time trying to code” to “just rolled my own custom GPT to optimize this.”
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoi think the plan of folks like these is keep peddling agi, replacement, line blurring and make the money through secondaries for as long as possible till it all collapses like crypto.
- rvz 2y agoDepends. If it is for writing documents, you really don't need a lot of 'technical writers'. For managing engineers? Honestly a competent staff engineer can replace 2 PMs. For writing code with PMs replacing Engineers with AI assistants? Very unlikely, even if they try as soon as you get to the question on maintaining an existing codebase, this is where LLMs begin to hallucinate more and struggle. The typical PM won't know that they generated bad code. You still need an engineer to detect that. This is a obvious bubble repeating like it's 1999.
- kccqzy 2y agoMost engineers are bad at writing documentation. They are so blind at writing badly that they won't even realize their writing is bad. I've reviewed a large number of design docs, and the average quality is so bad that the doc reviewer will just reply with many comments and requests for clarification. AI can fix things like grammar and phrasing, but it won't be able to fix the context that's missing. Managing engineers is not the job of PMs anyway. PMs are supposed to manage projects, not people.
- Aurornis 2y ago> “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? Banning engineers from prompts altogether feels extremely arbitrary. If this was a healthy relationship they’d at least say the engineers and PMs work together on prompts. Banning them is just politics.
- slowmovintarget 2y ago"Job security for me but not for thee."
- sublinear 2y agoRevenue loss for all though. No customer wants this crap.
- alberth 2y agoNo mention of Data Scientists (which is neither PM or Eng), seems odd.
- diegof79 2y agoThese 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.
- user9999999999 2y agoai replacing engineers is PM propaganda wet dream bs
- user9999999999 2y agoThe year is 2030, all work now consists of only human middle managers and ai. their rule is tyrannical.
- josefritzishere 2y agoEven 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.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI 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.