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 otherwise.<p>Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.
An easy correction is to only merge PRs from folks who are on the on call rota.<p>Those not on rota can either join or have their PR receive heavy scrutiny
Funny story: I work at Meta and posted a version of this internally in response the bizarre pressure and support for PMs landing prod diffs (the response was very positive FWIW).
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.<p>I feel like PMs coding unlocks a whole new category of work, mainly addressing the long tail of cool ideas/small optimisations that ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.<p>And I say this as a PM.
I think it depends on the company. In large companies, the role of PM probably won’t change that much. However, PMs who are technical and hands-on can bring significantly more value by leveraging AI tools.<p>There’s another path for PMs that the article and most of the comments don’t seem to mention.<p>Technical PMs are now in a great position to start their own companies. In the past, many were blocked or handicapped by the inability to code. With AI-assisted development, that barrier is much lower, which gives them a lot more leverage to build products themselves.
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 Claude $200 subscription alone. It is truly the next thing, and the future, probably happening in the next 2 years, or in 2 years in 2 years.<p>Yesterday I had an interview, but I got rejected. They decided to go for a manager with a Claude subscription who vibe-coded a weather app.<p>This is the end of software engineering.
The most valuable thing a PM can get from vibe coding isn't the code — it's empathy for engineering constraints. When a PM has actually tried to build something and hit edge cases, error handling, and state management, their specs get dramatically better. That said, the worst outcome is a PM who vibe-codes a prototype and then treats it as a production baseline. The sweet spot is using it for throwaway explorations, not shippable artifacts.
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.<p>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 experience to make sure the thing that lands is production quality.<p>At some point in the next few years I believe the roles will merge. I suspect that PMs will be forced to specialize towards a discipline (design, data science, engineering, etc.) while engineers will also start to see more of their responsibilities covering former PM territory. Most engineers will probably become closer to “product engineers”.
> Fun!!!!!<p>I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.<p>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!"<p>Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.
I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.
The linked article on evals is even more interesting.
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?
> With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful.<p>The most recent models have spooked me into believing this is a thing that is likely to be true at some point, but it ain't true yet.
Opposing Hot take (possibly missing the joke....):<p>Coding was never the most valuable skill a software engineer contributed. Socially-capable engineers are going to be far more likely than PMs to 'shine' when agents can write code and engineers are afforded more time to engage with busines/customers/stakeholder/domain experts.<p>If my experience is any reflection of the norm, the avg PMs greatest value has never come from effectively determining the value or requirement of a product or translating requests/feedback to meaningful deliverables. It's been in providing cover (time) for engineers that could do the same job better, but are irreplaceable in the development process and so are more rare/valuable spending time doing development. When engineers no longer need to write code, they are a more direct line to effectively solving "Product-Led" business needs with technical solutions than a typical PM will be.
This is kind of like the reverse of the sister comment, which I agree with: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699</a><p>The general point is that separating PM and eng doesn't make sense any longer. Which subsumes which is an interesting debate.<p>Your argument that 4.6 Opus makes the engineering skill set useless is totally false and maybe shows you haven't built anything complicated, but it is possible that Opus 5.2 will get there.
Buddy, when the engineering skill set is "no longer useful" you'll be living in a cardboard box at least a couple of years before that ever happens.
LOL....thats more a cold one.<p>Just wait what you pay for the tokens when the enshittification has started and the bubble bursted. In some years you will see that no new engineers are coming along and your products are dying on edge cases that the AI can't handle all together.<p>Edit: Ok, don't got the sarcasm :D
> Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?<p>Is this sarcasm? You don't think there is any utility to understanding code?<p>Edit: you got me haha.
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 separate PM attached to it.
I've worked without a product manager before and missed having a PM.<p>Without a PM, I conducted customer interviews, wrote up product requirement docs (PRD), and iterated with design on the mocks. On top of that, I had to implement the whole feature, while also juggling another track of technical work.<p>This would be fine if I was a founding engineer, but I'm not and wasn't being compensated enough for the extra workload. And sure, now with LLMs the coding portion is smaller, but there's still a lot of context switching and one might not able to do technical deep dives into things with all the meetings.<p>So don't overlook your PM.
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.
I totally agree (as a PM of ~10 years).<p>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.
As a developer, I don't see the PM as a boss or planner. It's the guy that handles the communication with all the people that don't understand what I say and ensures that they don't annoy me.<p>A PM is not optional when you want to have developers that have time to code and don't get distracted by thirty people that all want something else and all ASAP.
I remember this post. But I'm not sure what the future really entails and I suspect it'll be very company/culture dependent. In some companies, the engineers are very savvy and understand the business well. In others, it's the designers. Or sales. Ops. And of course Product Managers. You get the picture.<p>Whoever gets the business best (and in detail) will likely be the best builders. It's "intuition as evals" that really matters in the end. You think Software Engineers or Product Managers are replacing Quants at trading shops anytime soon? Nope.
PMs in Meta-scale companies vs. startups has always been different, and they are diverging even more as AI gets better.<p>In startups anything goes. PMs and engs do whatever it takes to ship and scale the business. No one cares who's using AI in what way, as long as they're getting shit done.<p>In a place like Meta or Amazon, people also get more shit done with AI, but because these teams are huge, well-oiled machines, sudden productivity bumps or norm changes can drop overall productivity.<p>Totally agree with this post as long as it's limited to large, mature teams
100%. PMs at startups already wear many hats and AI helps them do that even better.<p>But to this sister comment's point, I do think that the dedicated PM role will vanish and the classic BigCo PM will need to look a lot more like the startup one.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242699</a>
> Why should PMs code? Better communicate the idea/feature<p>I think this is the main takeaway, but I'm curious how bad the PM must have been at communicating to begin with if this is necessary.