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Comment by raviisoccupied | Hacker News Reader

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 ordinarily would not be addressed. Time will tell how valuable these items are in the long term.

And I say this as a PM.

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Agree. Also as a PM, one of the most important things you can do, once you've decided or understood "this is the most important thing we can be working on," is to sell that vision internally so you have high alignment and thus can move fast with shipping (i.e. Sales, Marketing, Legal et al are all on board and ready to help you get to market).

SHOWING internal folks something is always more compelling than words on a slide. So if you have good alignment with your Engineering team that the thing is possible, you can go off on your own and vibe-code something to garner internal alignment... and then throw it away and let your Engineers build the real thing. And they won't have to spend extra time on a PoC that's only meant to show off internally.

> then throw it away and let your Engineers build the real thing

Aaah, but the pull of "it's already built, 90% is done, let the eng polish it and that's it!" productivity siren song is strong...

>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

So you get to cowboy code, but I don't. I see how it is.

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

Maybe your cool ideas/small optimisations were not addressed because of how they would impact the system as a whole. It's the job of the engineer to keep things running and there are a lot of places that can wreck (slowly of quickly) the product if modified wrong.

Isn’t this the type of work interns used to do? Prototype hackathon type things?

In a real, large company, no. Interns generally still get the work that is prioritized but often too simplistic to spend Senior Dev time on to simplify Dev's job. For better or worse, Development represents what the executive level prioritizes often defined by Product Management/Program Management.

There's a whole other level of requests which for political or cultural reasons don't get touched even if there's a great internal rate of return to them or they reflect real bottlenecks elsewhere in the company.

Ideally any/every company would prioritize by actual internal rate of return but that's just not what most of us observe.

You'd be surprised. See this sister comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47242372

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