15 ms·

Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

120 points by cl42 1y ago

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 1y ago
umm thats the issue in most startups. code has docs. product fit does not.
jbmsf 1y ago
This was always the case.
bgwalter 1y ago
I wonder what his colleague Knuth at Stanford says about commercially driven hype like: "AI has made coding the easy part." "Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.
- brookst 1y ago
  Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code. All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    You can get pretty far with just K&R and in isolation if you write algorithmic code. Or with just APUE in isolation. LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats. Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
    - brookst 1y ago
      How many human developers have never learned from other peoples’ code? And let’s at least make up better stats. No way even 50% of the population understands and thinks about the issues. I’d say it’s probably 11.5184% actually.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    Humans don't need to read all of the existing code to produce new code. In fact humans invented code into existance.
    - brookst 1y ago
      Clever shift of “humans” meaning individuals in the first sentence, and the category in the second. Today’s humans who write code positively learned from reading other peoples’ code.
riazrizvi 1y ago
It’s actually outreach and business development but yeah it’s not coding or product development anymore. Why? because AI makes it easier to make credible sounding stuff, to maintain the appearance of progress, making it harder to tell who’s the real deal. So everyone is drowning in spammish AI. We all see it in recruiting (in all directions), it’s happening too in sales. On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.
- another_twist 1y ago
  Thats the thing. When coding does get automated my AI, software infra companies without hardware moats will be wiped out.
  - riazrizvi 1y ago
    LLMs are trained to write out sequences of words by mapping previous writing. So it’s recycling prior statements. There is no process/tech/innovation to train a system to engage in the world and figure out how things work. So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense). It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.
shubhamjain 1y ago
"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- anikom15 1y ago
  The Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975, and it seems hardly anyone has still bothered to read it.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    Yeah, when I read it (probably a decade ago now) it was remarkable how much of the advice was still applicable. If you (yes, you reader) haven't read it before you should do so. It's only 200 pages or so, mostly short articles so it's not a difficult read.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    I see this all the time to this day.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  "I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.
betaby 1y ago
If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.
- Kerrick 1y ago
  Open source projects left and right are banning contributors from using AI.
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    They have no way to actually verify that so it's just marketing to luddites.
- megaloblasto 1y ago
  Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    > If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none. It might be that the gp is smart enough to code without a crutch.
    - megaloblasto 1y ago
      I'll bet he's strong enough to push nails into wood so he never uses a hammer.
    - llbbdd 1y ago
      https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
  - J_McQuade 1y ago
ludicrousdispla 1y ago
I'd like AI to be the product management layer of the client/mgmt/engineer sandwich as then it has two sets of humans checking the work that are already used to managing around miscommunication. Letting AI do the JIRA work seems like a perfect fit.
baobabKoodaa 1y ago
Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shoveling bullshit for anyone who pays him.
- dcreater 1y ago
  Yup. I don't take him seriously any more. He's just cashing in on this hype cycle.
- sitkack 1y ago
  You haven't made any quantitative statements. Low effort personal attack. Who is paying him here? From your comment, you can't even tell the topic, let alone the actual idea he is putting forth.
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    He has a startup "AI" Fund: https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-vibe-coding-unfortunate-term-exhausting-job-2025-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-vibe-coding-unfort... So, at least his investors that he convinces are paying him. I do not know if he has other engagements in that area like speaker's fees etc.
    - baobabKoodaa 1y ago
      In addition, here are "courses" that he peddles nowadays: https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/ If you look into the courses, each one is basically a ~1 hour infomercial made in collaboration with a commercial company that is selling a product. Just to pick one off the top, here's "Fast Prototyping of GenAI Apps with Streamlit" Description: "Build and iterate GenAI apps in hours instead of days! Start with a simple chatbot, then add prompt engineering and RAG powered by Snowflake’s secure data and LLM services, then push your prototype to Snowflake or Streamlit Community Cloud for instant feedback and quick improvement." Instructor: "Dr. Chanin Nantasenamat is a Senior Developer Advocate at Snowflake, where he creates educational content for Streamlit and teaches developers to build interactive data apps." Every one of his "courses" are like this. It's fucking disgraceful.
d0gbread 1y ago
I'd love to read this article but the website is cancer. I keep clicking dismiss on mobile and it takes me to another website.
xenotux 1y ago
Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.
- Kerrick 1y ago
  Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > How many times... Literally all the time? Every single month? I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding. The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered. Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?" The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
  - dietr1ch 1y ago
    Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      The comparison is with other departments, like QA or localization. Figuring out libraries, deciding on architectures, researching documentation, that's an integral part of coding. The topic here is not keystrokes.
OutOfHere 1y ago
These days, most software startups with good ideas should be self-funded. Develop the software and figure out your outreach and marketing. Reap the profits. You don't need paper-pushing PMs. If you are seeking funding for a software startup, to me it's a red flag that your idea is probably bad, that you're just taking VCs for a ride. Hardware startups could still use funding.
supportengineer 1y ago
Perspectives from a 30 year career: The bottlenecks are always people and the false and artificial constraints they impose.
- mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
  It doesn't matter what knowledge based industry it is either, its always people, communication and decision making (or lack of) that makes everything take longer. Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
- claw-el 1y ago
  I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad. On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy. On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group. I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees. Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.
jlarocco 1y ago
How are the existing PMs using AI to make themselves more efficient?
- mdaniel 1y ago
  You say that, but my experience has been that product managers love nothing more than feeding entire webpages/specs/slack threads/email exchanges/whatever into ChatGPT and getting the 'summary' of it, and then pasting that into Jira and having the AI "make tickets" from it The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads
theptip 1y ago
I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff. If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.) If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
akshaychugh-xyz 1y ago
As a PM: - in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together) - in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.
rcarmo 1y ago
He is completely correct in principle, as most of the AI startups I have crossed paths with (I do some investment advisory) keep throwing AI at the wrong problems and/or don’t know how to mine for value in a product concept.
thwarted 1y ago
> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. There's that word "just". There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?) I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Unfortunately it seems he went from professor to grifter and it paid off.
pan69 1y ago
I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work. The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Let's not forget the part where they call for a meeting to ask a stupid question instead of checking wikipedia.
- another_twist 1y ago
  I have worked in large companies with dedicated PM roles and mostly had a pleasant experience. Except a few instances with "real alpha male" energy who wanted me to explain myself. Fortunately this was over Zoom so I explained the problem (I had caused it) and then exited the call. Feature ultimately got delivered, was used and so I was promoted.
- GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
  These people make me hate working. They don't want to pair with anyone. Understanding work at all is anathema to them. Their brains are too large for such trivial matters.
techpineapple 1y ago
This kinda feels like they’re saying they don’t have product market fit.
joeyguerra 1y ago
It's always been the bottleneck.
muldvarp 1y ago
Many people here are in complete denial about what's going to happen in the next years.

120 points by cl42 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

macinjosh 1y ago

umm thats the issue in most startups. code has docs. product fit does not.

jbmsf 1y ago

This was always the case.

bgwalter 1y ago

I wonder what his colleague Knuth at Stanford says about commercially driven hype like: "AI has made coding the easy part." "Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. The man has a complete disdain for the field and for the thousands of open source developers whose code he is using in laundered form.

brookst 1y ago
Good thing those open source developers learned their craft in isolated rooms, never seeing anyone else’s code. All of culture and technology builds be accreting on top of previous works. I can’t stand the moral outrage from people who are themselves standing on the shoulders of giants.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  You can get pretty far with just K&R and in isolation if you write algorithmic code. Or with just APUE in isolation. LLMs cannot, they need vast bodies of stolen text to become remotely useful. For all activities, humans need less training material than the laundromats. Aside from that, there are legal, philosophical and economic arguments that machines are not the same as humans and do not deserve the same rights. 99.99% of the world population outside of SV hype circles would agree with that.
  - brookst 1y ago
    How many human developers have never learned from other peoples’ code? And let’s at least make up better stats. No way even 50% of the population understands and thinks about the issues. I’d say it’s probably 11.5184% actually.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  Humans don't need to read all of the existing code to produce new code. In fact humans invented code into existance.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Clever shift of “humans” meaning individuals in the first sentence, and the category in the second. Today’s humans who write code positively learned from reading other peoples’ code.

riazrizvi 1y ago

It’s actually outreach and business development but yeah it’s not coding or product development anymore. Why? because AI makes it easier to make credible sounding stuff, to maintain the appearance of progress, making it harder to tell who’s the real deal. So everyone is drowning in spammish AI. We all see it in recruiting (in all directions), it’s happening too in sales. On top of this there’s also a confounding factor where it seems we can all do things we couldn’t before. So everyone is trying to reduce their dependencies and increase their offering. Which is driving down opportunities. The world of business is turning into one of those one-sided conferences where everyone is either look for a job, or looking for a sale. No-one is hiring. No-one is buying.

another_twist 1y ago
Thats the thing. When coding does get automated my AI, software infra companies without hardware moats will be wiped out.
- riazrizvi 1y ago
  LLMs are trained to write out sequences of words by mapping previous writing. So it’s recycling prior statements. There is no process/tech/innovation to train a system to engage in the world and figure out how things work. So AI is not yet coming for good writers, performers, journalists, programmers. It’s only lifting up the bottom rungs and giving them the ability to recycle, in the way that all the bad writers, performers, programmers do. That’s why it’s so tiring to consume - it’s the automation of hacks (in the writer, journalist sense). It also has the side-effect of preventing AI users from improving their skills. At least prolific hacks eventually got good in the past. Instead with vibe coding, your skills atrophy, with prolonged use it turns you back into a hack. So no. Coding is not going to get automated. We’re at the point where a critical mass of people are beginning to see that AI is falling short of the promise.

shubhamjain 1y ago

"This tool 10x the productivity of software engineers" "GREAT! That means we can fire the people who do the actual work, and replace them with MBA robots, who neither understand nor care about making a good product" Pardon my pessimism, but in my whole career, I have never met a PM who actual did the work of driving the product vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling information between management, marketing, design, and engineering. Thinking that hiring more PMs would increase the output in the age of AI is such a childish fantasy.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anikom15 1y ago
The Mythical Man-Month was written in 1975, and it seems hardly anyone has still bothered to read it.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  Yeah, when I read it (probably a decade ago now) it was remarkable how much of the advice was still applicable. If you (yes, you reader) haven't read it before you should do so. It's only 200 pages or so, mostly short articles so it's not a difficult read.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  I see this all the time to this day.
crazygringo 1y ago
"I have never met an engineer who actually did the work of driving the engineering vision. Most were just middlemen shuttling data between servers, disks, clients, and CPUs." You seem to have a deep misunderstanding of the value PM's provide. What you describe as "just" is a challenging job. Generally, the vision is set by the founder, and it can be written down in a sentence or two. There's a ton of work trying to translate that vision into something that is coherent across engineers, customers, sales, and marketing.

betaby 1y ago

If AI is that good, can someone code a good XML library with AI? The spec is available. If AI is that good, there should be an explosion of Open Source projects of good quality. Neither of those is happening.

Kerrick 1y ago
Open source projects left and right are banning contributors from using AI.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  They have no way to actually verify that so it's just marketing to luddites.
megaloblasto 1y ago
Many people are seeing huge gains in coding productivity with AI. If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  > If you're not one of those people it might be useful to evaluate why you aren't experiencing any benefits, instead of claiming that there are none. It might be that the gp is smart enough to code without a crutch.
  - megaloblasto 1y ago
    I'll bet he's strong enough to push nails into wood so he never uses a hammer.
  - llbbdd 1y ago
    https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- J_McQuade 1y ago

ludicrousdispla 1y ago

I'd like AI to be the product management layer of the client/mgmt/engineer sandwich as then it has two sets of humans checking the work that are already used to managing around miscommunication. Letting AI do the JIRA work seems like a perfect fit.

baobabKoodaa 1y ago

Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shoveling bullshit for anyone who pays him.

dcreater 1y ago
Yup. I don't take him seriously any more. He's just cashing in on this hype cycle.
sitkack 1y ago
You haven't made any quantitative statements. Low effort personal attack. Who is paying him here? From your comment, you can't even tell the topic, let alone the actual idea he is putting forth.
- bgwalter 1y ago
  He has a startup "AI" Fund: https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-vibe-coding-unfortunate-term-exhausting-job-2025-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-ng-vibe-coding-unfort... So, at least his investors that he convinces are paying him. I do not know if he has other engagements in that area like speaker's fees etc.
  - baobabKoodaa 1y ago
    In addition, here are "courses" that he peddles nowadays: https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/courses/ If you look into the courses, each one is basically a ~1 hour infomercial made in collaboration with a commercial company that is selling a product. Just to pick one off the top, here's "Fast Prototyping of GenAI Apps with Streamlit" Description: "Build and iterate GenAI apps in hours instead of days! Start with a simple chatbot, then add prompt engineering and RAG powered by Snowflake’s secure data and LLM services, then push your prototype to Snowflake or Streamlit Community Cloud for instant feedback and quick improvement." Instructor: "Dr. Chanin Nantasenamat is a Senior Developer Advocate at Snowflake, where he creates educational content for Streamlit and teaches developers to build interactive data apps." Every one of his "courses" are like this. It's fucking disgraceful.

d0gbread 1y ago

I'd love to read this article but the website is cancer. I keep clicking dismiss on mobile and it takes me to another website.

xenotux 1y ago

Coding as such is seldom a bottleneck to begin with. How many times have you been in a conversation along the lines of "we have every detail of the product figured out, but we need another month for the coders to finish writing the code"? The bottlenecks are almost always elsewhere. Design, quality assurance and debugging, art assets, localizations, hiring, performance management, you name it. And to be fair, AI can streamline some of that.

Kerrick 1y ago
Every time I hear somebody say a phrase like “art assets” I am humbled, reminded that not all programmers have the same experiences or work in the same environments as I do. I don’t usually think about art assets being a blocking part of the workflow because I work on enterprise information systems.
crazygringo 1y ago
> How many times... Literally all the time? Every single month? I am struggling to understand your perspective. In my existence, the bottleneck is always the coding. The development team has a backlog that could keep them busy for years. Meanwhile, everyone else -- QA, localization, whatever -- operates at whatever pace the code gets delivered. Never in my entire life have I been in the situation where the engineering manager said, "well folks, localization is backed up so we've got no more code we need to write. Go home and check in next week to see if we have any work?" The only exception I can think of might be videogames where the bottleneck is the art and then maybe the testing loop. But gaming isn't representative of software development generally at all.
- dietr1ch 1y ago
  Your "coding team" there isn't actually coding most of the time. Sitting down to type isn't the bottleneck, but the work that needs to happen so you can sit down and type what needs to be typed.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    The comparison is with other departments, like QA or localization. Figuring out libraries, deciding on architectures, researching documentation, that's an integral part of coding. The topic here is not keystrokes.

OutOfHere 1y ago

These days, most software startups with good ideas should be self-funded. Develop the software and figure out your outreach and marketing. Reap the profits. You don't need paper-pushing PMs. If you are seeking funding for a software startup, to me it's a red flag that your idea is probably bad, that you're just taking VCs for a ride. Hardware startups could still use funding.

supportengineer 1y ago

Perspectives from a 30 year career: The bottlenecks are always people and the false and artificial constraints they impose.

mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
It doesn't matter what knowledge based industry it is either, its always people, communication and decision making (or lack of) that makes everything take longer. Get a committee together to decide multiple products priorities, features, designs and you could be months away from having anything defined enough to code.
claw-el 1y ago
I have seen two sides of these artificial constraints people at their work impose. I am still not sure if these artificial constraints are good or bad. On one hand, I see these artificial constraints making it hard for individuals of varying skill set (outside of the imposed constraint) to contribute better for a group of people working together. This is when startups say they are scrappier and ‘just do it’ instead of being bogged down by bureaucracy. On the other hand, having these artificial constraints makes it very easy for hiring, training, communication and alignment, all which are also important in a functioning group. I work at a place where I interact with customers of various sizes. Sometimes I wonder why larger companies come up with this weird bureaucratic political system of constraints limiting their employees. Other times, I wonder why some smaller companies let their employees manager a critical system when they seem part expert but not really capable of handling it end to end yet.

jlarocco 1y ago

How are the existing PMs using AI to make themselves more efficient?

mdaniel 1y ago
You say that, but my experience has been that product managers love nothing more than feeding entire webpages/specs/slack threads/email exchanges/whatever into ChatGPT and getting the 'summary' of it, and then pasting that into Jira and having the AI "make tickets" from it The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads

theptip 1y ago

I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff. If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.) If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.

akshaychugh-xyz 1y ago

As a PM: - in professional settings, I internally feel more pressured to complete product thinking 'faster'. I don't yet see product management being the bottleneck though, it is still code (or getting people together) - in personally settings/side projects, def. What to build has become so much more important. But I also feel it has taken the pressure a Lil off bad ideas, when the cost of building has reduced.

rcarmo 1y ago

He is completely correct in principle, as most of the AI startups I have crossed paths with (I do some investment advisory) keep throwing AI at the wrong problems and/or don’t know how to mine for value in a product concept.

thwarted 1y ago

> Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said. There's that word "just". There is no way Andrew Ng—Stanford professor and cofounder and former head of Google Brain who is 49 years old with a net worth of $100m and has written 200 research papers—is calling up his friends to come over and vibe code on the weekend. Does he entice them with pizza and beer? And at the end of the weekend they lean back, look at the AI's handiwork, and slap each other on the back, congratulating themselves on not taking three months to produce this thing they are going to ignore? (Or does Andrew Ng and his buddies have a new startup's worth of code every Monday for the last couple of years?) I mean, if that was my situation I'd like to think I'd spend time coding, but herding a bunch of other millionaires to get together and think they're competing, John Henry style, with actual, dedicated engineers doing it "the old way" seems unlikely.

LtWorf 1y ago
Unfortunately it seems he went from professor to grifter and it paid off.

pan69 1y ago

I work in a large enterprise where they are jumping on the product manager bandwagon as well. Personally I don't mind the idea of this role but, similar to the product owner role, it seems to be an invention of consultancies as a way to place high-energy high-billable resources at cash rich companies. So, now we're getting all these "hustlers" being onboarded who eventually don't do much other than parading around and shouting orders at the people doing the actual work. The way I see it, product management is not a role, is a discipline. There needs to be more partnering in software. E.g. pair a project manager with a tech-lead, together they do product management.

LtWorf 1y ago
Let's not forget the part where they call for a meeting to ask a stupid question instead of checking wikipedia.
another_twist 1y ago
I have worked in large companies with dedicated PM roles and mostly had a pleasant experience. Except a few instances with "real alpha male" energy who wanted me to explain myself. Fortunately this was over Zoom so I explained the problem (I had caused it) and then exited the call. Feature ultimately got delivered, was used and so I was promoted.
GloriousMEEPT 1y ago
These people make me hate working. They don't want to pair with anyone. Understanding work at all is anathema to them. Their brains are too large for such trivial matters.

techpineapple 1y ago

This kinda feels like they’re saying they don’t have product market fit.

joeyguerra 1y ago

It's always been the bottleneck.

muldvarp 1y ago

Many people here are in complete denial about what's going to happen in the next years.