Arguing Agile

AA214 - Vibe Coding: New Dystopian World or Just Another Tool?

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 214

Share episode

We're talking about either the terrifying or totally mundane new world of "vibe coding" - using AI to generate code without deep technical expertise. 

Joining Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel for this podcast, we're happy to welcome back to the podcast Lenar Mukhamadiev, CEO of iDelsoft (https://idelsoft.com)!

Listen as we discuss how this trend is changing product development, software engineering careers, and business innovation. Stick around while we argue over resistance, how vibe coding enables faster market testing and many more points, including:

  • Accelerating time-to-market for new ideas
  • Evolving role of professional developers
  • Understanding business problems is more valuable than coding
  • Emergence of "product engineers," or not
  • A future where everyone is a software creator

#AIinTech #ProductDevelopment #FutureOfWork

= = = = = = = = = = = =

YouTube

Subscribe on YouTube

Apple

Spotify

= = = = = = = = = = = =

Toronto Is My Beat (Music Sample)

By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)

CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

The original cold open was gonna be like, Hey man, have you checked anything into production in a while? It'd be a lot cooler if you did. Now, now it's the boss standing over your desk going, yeah, I'm gonna need you to vibe code that feature into production in the next hour. Those tps reports. The terrifying world of vibe coding. That's what we're talking about today. Lenar's back on the podcast. Yay. Welcome Lenar. Welcome back, Lenar. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Again, most people that listen to the podcast know that I like to wait until the headlines die down before I really explore something on the podcast. Because there's enough YouTube channels and stuff doing that where it's like, that's just not where I'm trying to compete. You are too cool for that also. Yeah. We're like the we we're the AI hipsters . We were doing ai That's right. Well, before it was cool. Speaking of doing ai, well before, it was cool this is your topic Lenar, you brought it to me. You're like, Hey, have you ever had a podcast on vibe coding? Can we define what that is first for those people that are like tuning in going, what's that? I will say vibe coding is something that true engineers hate. Oh. But business executives and, and early stage founders love. You barely find people who are neutral about it. Everyone has an opinion on that. And you guys too, and me too. So obviously there are pros and cons. when it comes to pros, it's definitely, it will let you build things faster. Yeah. And go to the market faster and acquire customers faster. Right. But obviously you have to know what you're doing. When it comes to disadvantages a lot of developers will complain that, vibe coating is basically creating and generating spaghetti code. Yeah. And now I have to refactor it and I have to deal with it. And it's our nature. Human nature is creating things, but then you're forcing developers dealing with someone else's mistakes. In this case, AI mistakes, right? So, Like a nuanced take on vibe coding ugh, that's, not what Silicon Valley wants. But I mean, we're gonna dig into it today, I guess. Are you gonna be along for this ride?, are you signing off for this? I'm signing up for this. I just wanted to explain to those that don't really know what the term means. It's basically looking at using tools like AI to create code. Yeah. Without actually having expertise to create code yourself. Yeah. the thing that we do want to discovering ideas, knocking down ideas through your MVPs and exploring new markets. That speed. Let's talk about that first.'cause that's the most alluring thing to talk about that nobody's really talking about. So Arguing Agile 143 was about MVP because om knows that I have a hangup and if I ever did a tech event or presented at the product event or whatever, MVP would be my presentation, because the term MVP is so loaded with so many different things that the original meaning of what MVP was supposed to be has just been lost. It's just like it's unrecoverable. It's like that car that you really love, but it's got right around 180,000 miles on it and you're like, Ooh I could buy a new car and be spending less in maintenance. It's time to let it go. Like that's MVP to me. I really, I love it. It's day has come and gone, but I can't keep it in. Well, everyone has their own definition of MVP. Like what's MVP? Right. So MVP is like something, I'm gonna build something scrappy, I'm going to send it to the market, and then someone else will buy it, test it for me, give me feedback for free, and then I'm gonna iterate. Right, right. Is that, is this happening right now? I don't think so. I don't know. It depends on the product. I feel like there are some products out there that basically treat the market as their. You know, qa, throw it out there. And then get feedback for free. it's a lot cheaper than hiring QA people. Oh man. Do we know any products like that? There are so many tools out there, like users watch quite, that should be testing, like what theory? Tools in parallel and giving honest feedback. Right now, users just wanna test things. If it's "not good", they good they just wanna throw it away. Yeah , they're not interested in your success. So vibe coding is solving the problem. MVP, which as we agreed, doesn't exist, right. With this amount of tools that we have right now, but also like scaling and VCs and investors. Customers, they all already want ready to go product.. That they can inject Naturally into their workflows. It's almost like VCs talk about MVP, but what they really want is a fully built out working product.. Yesterday with customers with minimum investment, with existing customers And recurring stream revenue. But the spirit of speed to innovation is like, it's not for the vultures and it's not for the big companies. I feel the spirit of innovation, this category where it gets traction for me is if you're doing something by yourself or if there's like two or three people and like at that point you have a big advantage. If you don't know what you're doing, seriously, if you don't know you, you're new into a market. Or a segment of the market, then vibe coating gives you an advantage because you can try and get something out there, even if it gets knocked down, but you get there quicker. So time to market is really what I'm driving at. It is a lot quicker or shorter, I should say, time to market's shorter using techniques like wipe coating. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I agree. I think before we, we used to have a scenario where companies were attracting investments even being pre-revenue, but they already had a team of like six developers working on it, and it will take them like six to eight months right now founders and everyone who is building an MVP or early stage product, they built it fast, right? And then they deal with scalability later. yeah. You know, , that's, I think that's the best thing about vibe coding is that everyone is a founder now, but the negative side about it, everyone has a micro SaaS or, or, or any other tool. So amount of tools that's available in the market is. Crazy right now. Yeah. Everyone is dumping prices to get their customers. Value is not necessary there. but investors are obviously interested in enterprise level product. which they can lock large customers in like Jira for example. And they cannot, and they cannot move away from it so, but I'm just curious. Like in three to five years, will, there be any startup that will become unicorn and it had like 80% or more code was generated by ai. I think like enterprise level customers, I personally believe so I think you're looking at probably somewhere around the two years, give or take a little where you will see that now as far as the viability of that, that remains to be seen, right? Mm-hmm. But you'll see, that is my belief. Within the next two to three years, especially based on just the sheer rate of progress in this field. Yeah, it's mind blowing. It really is. So that's what I think. I think you're gonna see that it may crash and burn quickly, but then along comes the next version and so on. Right. For the next player with another product. I don't think there's anything that can stop this. There's not really a lot of pushback on speed and innovation. the only pushback on speed and innovation would be if you vibe code your way through a working functional MVP. And now you keep like, buckling on modules and additions and you know what I mean? You've built this Frankenstein of a not, not, not so I don't, I'm only lightly bringing up pushback because in reality I've worked on real software development teams with real professional developers who don't vibe anything. Yeah. Who build monstrosities like this Sure. By hand. So now you can do it faster. Now you're doing it faster. Yeah. Without knowing what you're doing. That's okay I, so like, I'm gonna save my real pushback for later in the podcast things I want to talk about, but the next category that we lead into with this conversation is professional developers. what happens to the class of professional developers?'cause my dystopian future for this of like, vibe coding tools are everywhere and everyone is like, it becomes ingrained in the culture that, oh, you've gotta buy the latest vibe, coding tools, and you've gotta buy the latest. You know, a hundred dollars a month Claude subscription or you gotta get on, on board with the latest and greatest tools all the time. What happens to the professional developers that are out there? Like, do they go extinct? Do they turn into full-time debuggers where we don't go to them to build our new stuff first? We just go to like random people that are good at vibe coding, and then they shake out the solution. Even in the previous category where I was talking about like mo putting together the Frankenstein of software mm-hmm. You need at some point, somebody, who actually understands how software is put together. If you're doing anything other than I'm developing this tiny little standalone thing, it's gonna go out there and sit out there for one tiny business process and never be touched again. If it's that, then I'll see myself out. You've always needed people that understand how software works, right? The difference now in this latest model is you need them later. You don't need them upfront because you can get three or four versions of what you're doing out there really, really quickly. When one of those takes traction in the business or in the market granted the quality isn't there. That might've been one of the other pushbacks on the previous category is, yeah, you can get there quicker, but, what's the quality look like? you need those people to clean up the mess later. Yeah. That, that's what I think is gonna happen. So will developers go extinct? No. Will, development jobs go extinct. No. Right? So a lot of people are getting something wrong about software development and any code related jobs, whether it's test automation or DevOps, Only 20% of the job is generating code. 80% of the job is dealing with existing issues. Scaling backend issues. There's some people having heartburn right now, like om, om knows all those people having heartburn right now. But the people I do I understand it. Om understands it, but there, I've been in some programs at large companies that they're, they're trying to wring, they're like, oh no, if you don't if you're not hands on keyboards, like typing away code 70, 80% of your time, they, they pick a number right? Then it's a big deal. Yeah. About like, oh, oh, you gotta get these people outta these meetings or whatever. Maybe that's just like a, I had a memory of like a bad culture that just derailed the conversation right now. But that's, it's in a shockingly large amount of places that I've been at that think like that. They don't think about software development being a team sport. They think of it as being oh, keep these, don't distract these people from. Writing code. I think the, the speaking of like the leader leadership who doesn't understand software development, right? Yeah. Even if they, if they have ability to save like 7% of the time of develop of developers by using ai, they will go for it. Yeah. Have to understand. So even 7% is huge advancement. Imagine companies making like 7% more in a year, right. In terms of revenue or saving money. So it's a big deal. So even it's a 1%, 2%, it's still a big deal. So coming back to the question, developers will still be there. But I think, the description of a developer will change. So a lot of teams they already adopting AI as, as a assistant, right? Mm-hmm. Not as a replacement. So if you have developers who already know what, what is good code? What is bad code? These are the gold, right? Yeah. These are gold. If you have a developer who doesn't understand what they're generating, what kind code, code they're generating through ai, and they don't understand what's going on under the hood these people will go extinct, right? So scalability is another issue. I think I'm talk about it. It's it's a long term goal, but the short term goal is to stack up your team with a team of developers who can understand and can utilize AI for themselves . scalability is always like issue for the last because yeah. If you build scrappy MVP and ship it to the market mm-hmm. and now you already have customers and you already have revenue, it's way easier to scale when you have revenue. Yeah. And it's way harder to scale if you don't have revenue. We need money. You need to hire developers and you cannot keep resisting AI because you don't like it. Yeah. Right. You have to use it for your own good, for your own business and for more revenue, for more customers, et cetera, et cetera. So these developers will be there and they will flourish. They will have higher salaries, they'll get a lot of offers from companies with better jobs. Better opportunities. And we have, we keep forgetting that AI. As a thing is like less than three years old right now. We have, like I'm talking about LLMs, right? Mm-hmm. We expect too much from everyone right now because of the ai, we're thinking that AI will automate everything, but in reality, come on, it's been three years only, and you're saying in two years we'll have unicorn. I think we're gonna start to see that. But again, I also said that they may crash and burn, right? But that's when it will start. So if it starts there, you project out another year and a half to two years after that, it could become a reality. And also one thing I'll probably mention that the role of software development the software developers and product managers will emerge. having good code and writing good requirements. Is gonna be like skills that will be in one person. So we'll have product engineers, right? There are already skills that are in one person. Yeah. It just imagine how much value can bring to the business, to the, to the companies. If you can combine product managers and software developers and software developers who can actually own the problem, not do what product managers told them to do, right. And deliver it all the way . so let's tackle that one in two parts. We already have those people today in software development and they're called the hero developers . And at some shops, they save the day. And then that person that treats people really badly and gets away with a lot of dirt. And can't seem to get fired. You know, in some shops they're the person that stays up till all hours trying to get things done across the finish line making their team look bad, but they look good, you know? The better shops, the team coalesces and deals with it together and you don't have individuals kind of sticking out. What does that dynamic look like , with Vibe coding? I think those hero developers would be leading the charge with vibe coding because they can be a hero a lot quicker. They can demonstrate to their fellows, developers, or even leadership, that they can quickly come up with code that works. So I think they're the ones that are gonna be leading. In this, in this space, they'll figure out how to vibe code. They'll figure out how to lead with that and say, I did this. Right. Should they do? Mm-hmm. So about me, me, me with the heroes to the point where they can make themselves indispensable for the organization. Well, what's different though? We already had these type of developers before AI even, who was like, if something was broken, they're like, okay, Mike knows what's broken. He's been here long enough to understand. So what's different with ai? Speed is, is the thing that's different now, right? So we're talking about speed to market Now, they can quickly come up with something, and if that's not right, they can quickly pivot using vibe coding. so it's this skillset that's needed to vibe, code that they can bring to the bear.'cause they're already good developers, presumably, or at least technically proficient, let me put it that way. So they're able to bridge this divide pretty quickly, I feel, compared to the other developers that they work with. Well in my, observation the ones who are resisting AI cogen tools are developers, right? And it's gonna be hard to force this rockstar developers. To do vibe coding also like, and to understand product requirements and go from there because they so used to do certain amount of work and they are so, so used to have a niche set of responsibilities at, at the company. And they'll be resisting. Also, these people are, I know now they call hero developers, but before they used to call like 10 X engineers, right? 10 X developers. Right. But one thing is 10, sorry, 10 x to me means they'll take 10 x more the abuse than like, I, sorry, I, not exactly, I understand. There, there are people that are like, it's, it's not a, like software development, software engineering , the scaling is not linear based on experience. So you can have one person , with five years of experience that is 10 times faster than another person sitting next to him with an equal amount of experience. And it's just like I would expect someone with 10 years experience to be this much faster than whatever., It just doesn't work that way, you know? And there's a reason for that, which probably should be a whole different podcast. But maybe vibe coding is not completely fair.'cause we're kind of producing code that it work is working, but you don't really understand the code that's written that's like the spirit of vibe coding is, I don't know how to, I don't Well look also 10 X engineer AKA hero developer, right. These are not people who are generating 10 x more code than usual. Yeah. Right. With ai, these are people who are bringing 10 x more value than developers. It's not about the quality of the code. Code could be perfect, right? It was, it'll be amazing. But do they deliver value or not to the company, to organization. Right. So it's obviously what is Hero developer AKA 10 engineer in, in a nutshell, right? Is this someone who went through Stanford Bachelor, master's, have PhD in computer science, worked at Google 10 years and working at x, Y, Z company. Or is this Mike from community college in Oklahoma who's been with the company for 20 years Yeah. Who is delivering more value? Yeah. At this today, it's, it's Mike. Right. Even though like the guy from Stanford could be way skilled, way experienced, but the guy who been at the company long enough who understands the code, who understands that if you change this, this will break. If you change that one, this will break. I think that one is providing more value. So understanding the code, understanding the business as a whole, I think that's the skill that will be highly appreciated in the future. And even now, if you know what you are doing and why you're doing it, for what purpose, you will succeed as a developer tester, DevOps engineer. Product manager. Project manager UX designer, whatever. But if you are just there to do what you've been told to do, then you're gonna be probably falling behind, although I hate this word, but you'll have less opportunities in the future. It doesn't mean that you will not have opportunities, but you'll have less opportunities. the thing that scares me about the way that technology is being pitched is like everybody is an individual developer now and can, come up with their own solutions, their own unique view of solutions, whereas. A lot of stuff that we talk about on the podcast is making software development a team sport rather than a I'll, you just tell me what you need. I'll go off in the corner and code for whatever, a couple weeks and then , don't disturb me and put my headphones on. Yeah. That stereotype of that type of developer it's already, it's, it arguably, I don't know if it was ever in vogue past 2005 or whatever, you know what I mean? I'm gonna remind you one thing. So one year ago when we were having this podcast, I was telling you guys generalist people will be in demand. And you were like, oh, I thought experts are in demand. They absolutely were. There was tons of people pedaling you gotta be an AI product manager or a FinTech product manager, and now it's reality. As and, and again like, I, with stuff like that, I always wonder like, is it, is it because I have the experience and I understand like it's better to have the software development, product management experience together, and then with those two things, you can jump from domain to domain successfully. Mm-hmm. You have the skills for success no matter what. It's like a, it's like a, when your kids go through school, you want them to have enough general experience where whatever situation they face in the future, they have the skills for success, , but occasionally the market just moves through these waves up and down where they're like, no, no, no, no, no. I want someone who has 20 years of LLM experience or something some ridiculous 15 years with ChatGPT experience , imagine 20 years passed by and everyone is generalist now, right. Everyone can jump from one domain to another domain and then one company comes back like, does anyone know Java eight? They're, first of all, they're absolutely will people. Wait, wait. Lemme let. Think about it. What's have we done? Lemme think, think about, lemme think about, no, they're absolutely, like 15 years from now, there absolutely will be, be people out there going, does anyone know PHP five X? Like, I, I have a, well, listen, today we have people saying, does anybody know anyone who can still program in COBOL? Yes, exactly. There's a lot of COBOL stuff out there. Yeah. So I agree. There will be that, but it, it may not be mainstream, right? It'll be niche, but it'll be there. But that means good thing, right? People have corporate loyalty. People are gonna stay in the same job because they're gonna have less opportunities. I dunno if there's like, you just, you hit like, I, you hit a lot of topics, right? Yeah. You hit, you hit a lot of topics right there. I, I don't know if there is such thing as corporate loyalty, but I look forward to having another podcast on that topic. Mm-hmm. In the future! We're bending over backwards on the podcast to try to encourage the team sport of software development. The vibe coding is like, well, you don't need a team now, just ask the LLM and it'll spit out some code and just throw that into production thank goodness that the LLM cannot automatically. Write the code, , it does, the PR has, you approve it and rolls straight into production, like in one solid go. Some people are gonna be like, Brian tools can do that. They really can't. Not end-to-end like I'm talking about and end-to-end sandbox of like, puts it in the environment, lets you play with it and then pushes it up to production. I think a year from now that probably will exist and people will use it. And that is a tool we need, you know what I mean? I don't doubt that it will be there in a year from now. Yeah. But I mean, we're not that far away. But at that point are we moving, are we, are we moving retrograde in like it's not a team sport anymore, or like, what are, what are we doing with our lives? That's what I'm saying. Well, so it's one of two things, right? We we're trying to put out a you know, a matchstick with a fire hose possibly. Mm-hmm. So you can have multiple developers all doing their own thing. Mm-hmm. Right. All vibe coding, trying to solve different problems, hopefully, but sometimes not. Yeah. So that's one chaos scenario. The other side of the, the coin is kind of like what we did with mob programming before that pair programming, what is the stop A team of developers joining hands and saying, let's brainstorm this LLM together. So the nature of what you're asking of it mm-hmm. Is improved by many minds that are brought to bear on this. I'm actually like, I'm okay with this world. I actually kind of like this world. Where are you optimistic about the world, about the future? I am, the way om describes it. I am, the way you describe it, Lenar, I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't understand. Remember when your company have a D, BA, maybe we would have like 1D, BA for like 40 developers. When professional developers are looked at in that same way of , Hey, I'm gonna be vibe coding some stuff today, I really don't understand about software engineering. And maybe in like the, the modern corporation, 20 years from now, everybody in the modern corporation is a developer from the sense of like, everyone is developing. Software applications that get rolled out as everyone is delivering shareholder value. E everybody, well, everyone's doing that today. Arguably. I'm coming for you. Top management. That's what we're saying in this podcast. so in a world where everyone's a software developer, but not every function of the business in includes software development. I, I would say well true, right? But should we expect vibe marketing, vibe financing? No, no, no. Vibe Sales. What you can expect is like all the systems used by those kind of folks let's say like Salesforce for example, and objectively terrible system. It has a whole API with all the functionality available ready for you Theoretically all the power of Salesforce is there for you to actually use in a easy to use way in your business processes. Not the way that the Salesforce people. Like intended and put you in a box. Yeah. Like all their APIs are open and now you can like vibe code your way to like, oh, I built a new integration with Salesforce that works for our business processes. Like that's something that like you would've to like hand off to a development team and they would go off for six months and they would do whatever. Like you can do it now in like a day or two. Look at it like finance and recruiting in a business. Finance and recruiting small businesses might have like a part-time person for finance and recruiting, right? Maybe you go to a certain size, you need a full, full-time finance person. You know, or like a full-time corporate recruiter if you don't use staffing firms or whatever. I think of the future with vibe coding, where everyone is doing it, that I'm optimistic about is where we start looking at our software developers. Like we look at our finance professionals of like when the company grows to a certain size or when the architecture grows to a certain amount. We need to hire a professional developer who's an expert in systems and architecture to help us design better systems. And then they just become the expert. So when I know that you're the new person that we hired to do marketing campaigns or whatever, and you are sending out marketing surveys'cause you're buying ads on Facebook or something. Okay, well that's great, but I'm the CEO and I'm like, okay, oh, you're running our new marketing campaign for this thing. We're selling widgets on the internet . I want know what countries are talking about our widgets and I wanna, 'cause I wanna buy campaign ads and they're expensive or whatever, right? So go give me some data. Well, I don't know how to do that. Okay, cool. But you've got these tools, you've got these, whatever, the future AI tools right? Schedule some time with our software engineer. And rather than like software engineer being a divided function that's over here, this expert software engineer will come sit with you and help you as you do your vibe code, kind of help you get on track understanding how to push your PRS through or whatever, whatever you need to do. Right? Right. And that just becomes another like business function. Just like if you had to like manage a budget, you'd get the finance person, they'd come over, they'd be like, what are you doing kid? Like, what the, the pluses go here. The minuses go here and the number come out, comes out the bottom. I think that's a cool world. I think that's cool. It's a cool world. I also think that it depends on the organization. So you're gonna see this, I think, in certain organizations that are open mm-hmm. To this kind of hybridized approach, right? Mm-hmm. But others where they're more died in the world. With like silo and this is what this function is, and you don't bleed into another function. Those ones will suffer that. That's what I think. Sure, right. Good people will leave those organizations and move to the others. I think what we're talking about, and you guys mentioning that as vibe, coding as a future, actually it's not future. Future is no coders at all. That's the future. Vibe coding is a reality right now. It's happening. It might be existing for a couple more years, maybe longer. We don't know. We cannot predict future. But I think , the one thing that's gonna be incredibly common is that coder, AI coder, AI agent, that actually develops code, understands release. Roll back if something fails, fixes it, and then release. So I think that's the future. Vibe coding is only a stage. We are at the stage of software development. Yeah. And as AI gonna progress everyone, every company will have some departments people replaced and they'll have AI implemented for certain workflows, but we don't know how, how soon it's gonna be. Right. Yeah. Vibe coding is Excel solution for now. Everyone should jump on that bandwagon, right? it's a best way to learn coding, best way to understand business. before to start the business, you'll have to hire marketing guys. You'll have to hire designers. Sales, everything. You can automate it with AI right now. Yeah. Partially. I'm running my business. We have three people in operations. We have 35 people working in the team, but internally we have only three people. Yeah. And we're surviving somehow, right? Yeah. And a lot of things are being replaced by ai. We create content, we create the designs, we create code, we create sketches, we create product recommendation with ai. So it's saving a lot of time and it's a good thing. Right. As for businesses. Mm-hmm. Just to confirm. for people not sure, but they can turn it into good thing for themself if they're gonna adopt it and not gonna resist it. Right. If you're gonna keep resisting it, that's your problem. You have to adopt it and accept it as a reality. You cannot fight the waves, you know? Mm-hmm., You can win against the waves probably one day, but you'll be dead. Well, yeah. Well, you, you can win like any, any like if the. If you're saying it's another tool in your arsenal of many, many tools Exactly. With which you run a successful business I'm, I'm there, I'm right behind you. I'll back you up a hundred percent. I like the Silicon Valley. People are like, they, they're gonna be very angry with you this is not the way we sell our chat requirements, documents, whatever, like products or whatever that Yeah. That automate things that probably never should have been done in the first place. But I wanna pivot us to the product management side of it, is what I'm saying. in a future state where everyone has the tools of a software engineer, everyone can create like business class software, like just out of thin air in a day or two and commit it to production, what happens to the discipline of product management in the future? Because the theoretically, like what we started with the podcast is speed to market. If literally anybody in the company can test an MVP and I mean a, a real MVP, which is can customers figure out how to use this? Can we sell this? And is this something that our company can maintain? Like those questions, right? The not like, I'm gonna build a million different things, just this tiny little thing, and then ask those questions and get real market signal, build a case, bring it to the business. I build a thing. I think this should be a new product line or a new service or a new offering or whatever. When everyone in the business can do that, first of all, like you have a whole different business on your head. Like you, you have a whole different level of success if all your employees are trying to contribute to the bottom line. Like that's, I would think that's what you want as someone running a business.'cause that's as, as someone just running a product who is a segment of the business. That's what I want. I want everybody trying to like achieve success that's not where my ego gets challenged of like, who came up with a cool new idea that hit against the market. I think success is cool and I'll double, triple down on it with whoever's making the innovation, like the problem with this one, the product management governance. Where am I Governance? Governance is a four letter word for me, by the way. This one scares me. You know, why does it scare you though? it scares me.'cause with ai, vibe coding, speed to market. I don't think this is the problem that, like the, the, the problem that is being pitched by the AI services providers right now, which is like more efficiency from your workers, like efficiency from the workers is not the problem. That's never been the problem. I mean, it hasn't been a problem in years. The, the companies will spend more money on workers if the business is generating actual revenue efficiency. The businesses will spend more time on workers, on high salaries, on hiring more people, if businesses actually generating more revenue. Efficiency is, in this case, is optimizing some stuff, right? It's not about acquiring new revenue, it's about saving money. Okay. Let's star generating more revenue , this is when private equity takes over. That, that's what, that's what they're, that's that's what they do. They optimize, then they bumped revenue. They try to optimize their way into increasing revenue. But it's not efficiency that leads to more revenue. It's effectiveness of your solutions that lead to more revenue, but it's a safer way than hiring a bunch of people and then expected revenue go up. What if get revenue doesn't go up? I agree with that. It is a safer play and that's probably why the private equity firms who are mostly staffed by financial folks like that, that's they're doing a financial calculation saying, well, was less risk in this 'cause we don't know how to come up with new ideas. Right. Also, private equity is like safer way of business than VC VCs are risk takers by nature. Right?'cause they invest and private equity is a what optimizing so. But, in the future where everyone is a software engineer, can come up with solutions from scratch and send them to production. That's the future I wanna bring you to, to have this discussion. Doesn't product management become. Untenable. Which projects are going? Are we gonna finance, which new product ideas are we gonna finance? How much of someone's time do we let them be free to vibe, code, potential solutions? Right now, if you just internally source from your employees, like how many employees do you have? Like 35. Okay. 35. So if you go to your 35 employees, you get'em all in one room. You say, I want to generate some new product ideas. And you get 20 ideas out of that session. Like you have to go through and prior, like you pick one at a time in the vibe code world of the future, you don't need to pick one at a time. You test like 20 different people come up with 20 different ideas. You can test 20 ideas at the same time because they can all be basically their own software engineering team and, I'm steering us into a whole different podcast right now. But go along with me 'cause I'm on a, I'm on a roll. This is where I wanted to go on this podcast'cause I think it's cool. Real product management, like not project management, real product management is, I'm going to give the thumbs up, the financial thumbs up for 20 parallel tests to happen against the market. Most people don't even get one test against the market. 20 parallel tests. Yeah. I'm gonna disrupt you. Okay. You're talking about product managers at large corporations where they getting paid for doing niche things, right? They're getting paid for testing ideas on the market while I have projects and I have product manager, they are adjusting Jira and they're moving tickets. So have to clarify what is product manager. In your scenario when you bring up your arguments product manager in a, a quote, real product manager. Meaning, meaning what my role is, is I am a founder with entire like, wing of the company and we, we test new businesses. You drive business decisions basically? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I don't do, there is an element of project management inside of product management, but not more than like, there's an element of project management inside of any executive function. Like you have deadlines, you have to start things, finish things. project management is just part of the world but to me it's a minor part of the world. But how are you gonna test 20 ideas if you are a small company and you have to go to market fast now. Now you're getting there now, now, like now you're, now you're in line with what I wanted to bring up, which is. Okay. In the past, you'd get 20 people together, you'd brainstorm an idea, like om can tell you like, there's some frameworks where you kind of like funnel your ideas down. Prioritization, prioritization, stuff like that., This is like pre-testing of ideas. Right. But there's, so you're channeling resources in a given direction. Yeah. Right. And in the new world, every directions are given direction. And multiple people are channeling ideas everywhere. Right? So first and foremost, testing ideas against the market isn't free. It costs money Right. To do this. Yeah, it does. So now you have 20 people at a time. It's costing the company money. Mm-hmm. So what what strategic direction is the company going in now at that point? Oh boy. When you have 20 different people pulling in different directions. Right. And also, like most companies like the strategies aren't even written down on paper. So you already like the question you just asked. Already is gonna put you on the you know, losing friends fast list. So, so like, but, but I, I also, this is another one of those categories. I started out being a little sassy, and now that we've talked about it, I actually like the future of this world. I like the future of where we're hey, it takes us this much money right now to test one idea on the market. Time, right? Yeah. Time is critical. Time is critical. Exactly. Yes. And now, now that everybody I mean, do they need a little help from the product manager to kind of help understand like what metrics should you be looking for? What how do customer outreach, how to kind of market and advocate for your ideas? Yeah, they need a little bit of coaching on product management, but if you have professional product managers in the house. Not, not pro, not a given, not project managers who are really Yeah, but that's not a given though. Why this future excites me now is the actual professionals in that space become respected experts and coaches for their discipline out to a wider audience who is now more capable because they got better tools. That's cool. First of all, not, not, I am not playing the role in this podcast that I thought I would be playing when we started. Here's a cool future where like you dude, instead of all of these tests that people have to vibe code solutions out quickly for all bottlenecking through the product manager where we can, oh, the product manager can only like deal with one of these. Every two, three weeks. Now we're doing 20 tests in parallel. Okay. Well, we need, like quickly, we need a scaled product management solution. But in the future, you're saying that we have to ship 20 features in parallel and see what's working, what's not. How will you test it? If you have one product manager , we don't bottleneck that one product manager to be like, Mr. Product manager, Mr. Product Manager. You've gotta test the solution. We open it up, we democratize the testing of business ideas now. Mm-hmm. And help coach just like we're doing with the developers, what I guess my takeaway for this is you can't open up the field of software development without opening up the field of the Marty Kagan holy triad of the designer, the product manager and the developer. All three of those positions now have to get opened up. You know, so if you're gonna be a product engineer like this, the thing that the Silicon Valley people are pitching now where like just have the product manager code all the solutions and do all the designs, and do all their own stunts and do their CGI and their own movies or whatever. I think it's more like engineers who has to understand product rather than product managers doing coding. It's just, that's a tough ask because product requires specific skill sets that typically you don't have in engineers, right? You have to have empathy for the customer. You have to reach out and get signals. Those aren't things that engineers generally. Possess. Most engineers will say feed me pizza, leave me in the basement. I'm gonna turn out good code. Right. So it requires that aptitude Which they have to learn and it can be learned. But we haven't seen that thus far, I think. But by product engineer, what we mean is the software engineer with product instincts, And also by product designer, we mean UX designer with product instincts. Oftentimes I witnessed this too many times to count UX designers will come up with ideas, which is not relevant to the customer at all. Because they think I'm creative person here. I am giving my creativity for you in exchange, for your money. But it's not the case. UX designer is about creativity. That's correct. But it's not about your creativity, it's about how you approach the problem of market. Customer. And I think same thing will be happening everywhere, right? Product designers, product engineers, product testers. Not only people who are testing it, but also prioritizing what to test first, right? So I think that will happen, but I think the product managers role will be crucial because they will be the ones who everyone will come up and understand, okay, is this what business needs? You know, because software engineers now is waiting for directions, as I mentioned, what to develop. They have no clue what company they work for. They have no clue what's the business of the company. They have no clue how they generate revenue, but eventually I think we're gonna have people who are more like Modern product managers who have empathy, customer empathy, customer instincts. Yeah. Market instincts, and also understanding why I'm doing this, you know? Mm-hmm. and especially in this world where a lot of people are driven by certain initiatives. Some people care about animal rights, some people care about certain stuff and nothing stops people from working for companies and for causes that they care about. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's the future. Mm-hmm. I think vibe coding alone is not gonna cut it. But if you have this market instincts, product instincts, I think that's where a success is. Yeah. In my opinion. And I don't think you get that. like I said, I kind of slowly changing my mind as we've gone on with the podcast. I look forward to a future where we have much better tools to create and solve business problems for actual people, actual users and then the people who are experts. The people that are experts are coaches that kind of help and adjust you know what I mean? the coaches in the Marty Kagan book and the Transform book where he's like, oh, hey, like product coaches, organizations you're not quite getting it. I need to write a whole book to help you along. Like he was like the modern manager in these organizations We don't need people to stand over each other with a clipboard and yell at you to Move along or whatever. Exactly we need you to coach these folks and help them develop their skills and understand what the business needs for them and what they need in the market. And the, the scary part is companies are not hiring entry level people. I think of entry level people as having like straight outta college, no work experience, entry level. And companies are not hiring entry level anymore. they're looking for people with like three years experience and that's the floor and that's their new quote, entry level. And there's a lot of games to be played with that or whatever, the, the, in this, in this. In this world where they're trying to replace the junior employees, whether that's marketing people or QA people or junior software engineers or whatever. There is an effect of trying to say, well, we'll just have AI and we'll just have senior people to coach and AI to do the work, and then we won't have junior engineers anymore does that, that creates a problem. I think, and I don't think I'm gonna switch sides on this one. I think that creates a problem. It is gonna create problems for the future. Right. Because what's gonna happen with those people that go through the mill, right. And the new intake, they can't get jobs Right. Because of the floor you mentioned. Right. What's gonna happen to that? What's gonna happen to the need of the industry 5, 7, 8 years into this journey? I'm optimistic about it actually. Because first of all, because some companies are still hiring junior developers as included, right? Some companies cannot replace everything with ai, government related companies data sensitive companies, like all this companies that are dealing with sensitive information, right? They cannot replace everything with AI because there's still human touch needed. Another thing is a liability issue. Yeah. You cannot fully get rid of the people because someone has to have a responsibility for the outcome, you know? Right. And if you can automate everything, you will not have someone to blame. And you can blame AI tool technically, right? Yeah. But it will be, I think, less effective. Third historically, aren't we all working less? Like, imagine like 300 years ago probably our grand, grand grandparents worked like 120 hours a week. And then they work less 80 hours a week. And then they work like 60 hours a week and then they work like 40 hours a week. Now we working 40 hours a week, but not even all of, not even people working 40 hours a week Now, realistically, people are working less actually. And the 40 hour thing only'cause we did the Taylorism podcast, did we di dive down this rabbit hole? But the like the 40 hour thing is less than a hundred years old. Yeah, yeah. So people work way more than that. What I'm optimistic about is in the future we will have certain work is done by ai and then humans will work less hours in a week. And we gonna just, we're just gonna have more time to enjoy lives. Are, am I, am I too? No, no. You found naive. So we found the other side. Right? Am I too naive? Other You're not naive, but also we're not gonna sell any AI books to Mark Benioff with us. You know, like lemme ask a question before we move off. So we talked about developers evolving into product, right? Product engineers, we have talked about, we talked about the other side too. Maybe product can do some coding through vibe, coding, et cetera. Mm-hmm. But the angle I want approach now is the customer has a problem so can the customer not do some vibe coding in conjunction with developers and product people? Do you think that's a viable thing? That's the beauty though for example, you're using certain tool that you need to use, but you hate it and now you wipe code something better for yourself. I'd code Jira replacements all day long. It can, you can even still do it now if it's solving your problem. And Brian, you told me that you have you developing a tool that's solving your problem. Why not? Exactly. Obviously, you cannot replace JIRA that's working for 500,000 people corporation, right? But if it's solving your own problem, why not?, There is a guy his name is Peter Levels, if I'm not mistaken. He's a guy. He's, he's guy behind the digital nomad remote. This, all this Yeah. Movement. He's shipping like new product, every month he has like 20, 30 startups running in parallel. Something is working, something's not. And he did solo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some He's putting minimal effort. Yeah. Just working product. He has one file index. PP that's whole code is running. Yeah. Right. And he has customers, he's scaling and he's generating good money. He's a solo founder. It's like, why not? Who is stopping you? I mean, dude, right now. Yeah. I mean, if you have certain understanding of the business, of the code keep pushing it and you'll, you'll get there. VC money, you don't even need that because you can build something small. I know a guy he's a good friend of mine. He's built, kind of like a service for mobile games, his team is like three people, four people himself, two developers, one operations. Yeah. His revenue is like millions. So it's the final word is that it's a lot easier to launch your own micro SaaS Right. And get rich out of it with AI than rely on Oh. Or employers gonna fire me or not. You know? So it's a lot of opportunities right now for people who wanna Absolutely. Even for juniors. Yeah. Yeah. If you are doing studying at the college, if you do, you learn, you're doing coding every day when you're college. Mm-hmm. Right? Because you have to learn. Right. You already have foundation. I mean, come on. where I have found success. Because I produce the podcast myself. A lot of things that are painful for me is like about recording the podcast, stitching things together, distributing it, marketing it. there are no tools that do that let's not even call it seamlessly. There's no tools that do that. roughly that work with each other. You have to duct tape certain stuff. Yeah. Same for us right now because we do sales marketing. Right. It's multiple tools, duct tape together. Mm-hmm. And I wish there was one tool that's solving Right. My unique problem. Right.'cause I, my, my problem is obviously common, but I still have unique challenges within the scope. Right. Yeah. And that'll be great to have option to vibe, code something. Yeah. And solve my unique problem. See, I am not scared of that future state. Real early when I met Mike Miller, he's a product coach, right? Real early when I met Mike Miller, he said something that has stuck with me all these years. So get off my lawn. I don't, I don't like, no. He said two things that have stuck with me all these years. And the other thing was every company is a technology company because every company, like with the, with the right tools, every company would do what you just said is like, Hey, I got all these tools to, to do my thing and then do marketing for the thing and then get my leads and bring 'em back in house. And I vibe coded this custom solution. So basically like you have this software that works to pull all this stuff together for your company, you're using it to internally facing. Help you orchestrate your processes with a little bit of like professional developer, like help. Yes. You could probably take those things and put 'em on the market and sell them to other people, but most people aren't gonna do that. Most people are just happy they've solved their own pain point. Exactly. And that, that's the future that I'm super interested in, especially as a product manager with a ton of experience now where like I can go into any ecosystem and say, what have you guys done to solve your own pain points and how can we think about making that a service that you can sell to other people?'cause there's tons of people that have done strategy pivots Yeah. Like AWS started like this actually, now that I'm thinking about it, dealing with compute. And paying for it is nonsense. We need to develop this and have it ready for anyone inside Amazon to use. They developed it, it was good. And then they're like, why don't we sell, just share, like timeshares on a, and then they did. And now you have modern AWS. So like, again, I like this feature, this is cool. Open up the tools, democratize the tools, whatever you wanna say I think that's cool. The only thing when you broaden it out, , in product management. I have a difficult time with the ability to let everybody know the cool stuff you're working on. There's an internal marketing aspect that's just internal, that's not even me driving out to the market. So what other people would think of as a training knowledge management function gets much harder when a lot of people are participating in product management and software development. Right at scale. that gets a lot harder. that's the only other thing that I'm not saying it's a problem, it is something we can solve. And I definitely would take that problem over. I can't innovate fast enough. Certainly. But that's about the only other pushback that I can think of that I would wanna bring up now.'cause everything else we kind of talked about. It's not the future, it's reality. I think that's the main takeaway I got from this conversation. And with all the tools available we can build stuff easily for ourselves that's solving our problem. And then we can scale or not scale. It's up to, it's up to us. Right? Yeah. And future is bright. We are optimistic. We're gonna work less hours, but we're gonna be more efficient for ourselves and we're gonna have more time to enjoy. The perks that this world has given to us. And I think the future of work is also gonna be great because after all, we cannot automate everything. And if we automate everything, what, 7 billion, maybe by that time, 10 billion people will gonna do. So that's a, that's a, a rosy picture of the, the future. I can't say I disagree with it over overall but it does beg me to ask the question given what you just said. Would you say then that AI is a revolution? Or is it an evolution? Evolution, yeah. I mean, some people say it's revolution, but it's obviously evolution. Yeah. Were the cars evolution or evolution when we start driving? Imagine like telling people like 200 years ago, who's riding a horse like, and it's like you're gonna be driving on, on wheels and it's gonna have gas inside an engine. And they're gonna be like, oh my God, what I would, what my taxi park from horses gonna do? You know, I'm gonna lose my business. I'd be my horse alone. That'd be my question. What's my horse business gonna do now? Everything is normal now. You know, like there is nothing shocking left in the world. Whatever happens. Something shockingly absurd or, or some news like we get over it, like we move on and we normalize stuff like really quick now. Because the world is moving too fast and. We cannot resist it because it's evolution, as I mentioned. You know it is just the world has become this and have to deal with it and we have to just understand that we are solving our own problems and whatever surround us, it's just instruments and tools to make our lives better. No, dude, I'm saying stop the world. I wanna get off. Oh, okay. Well, no, seriously though. I think it is a, it is definitely an evolution. This too shall pass. So we'll look back in a few years and say. What was all the hoopla about? Just like we did when we, computers came about, like laptops especially. Now people can move around with computers and there's more power in my watch now than there was in those compact two eight sixes or whatever. So, yeah, I mean, we're gonna look back at this, I think, hopefully fondly. Yeah. I hope so too. Yeah, I'm optimistic. Brian is not. I'm sold. Nah, I mean, , I've come around on the podcast, I started in the opposition phase of of like you need adults in the room. The only note I took is asterisk: there are no adults. That's what I wrote down. That'll be my takeaway of like, there are no adults in the world anymore. There are just kids that have stopped learning. It's amazing when I tell people. I've been around, through like, everything moving to the cloud, you know what I mean? I like, I've been around before. AWS was a thing, like Azure in the cloud was a thing, you know? And we survived all that we did. And there were just tools. There were just different ways of working. They weren't actually, our quality of life got better. Yeah, that's true though. You know, trends will come and pass. I, I remember when it was all about centralization and then it was decentralization and then back again now. Right, right. So trends will come and pass. It is just we're trying to make a better life for ourselves, to your point. Right? Yeah. And I think overall that's what's gonna happen. Yeah. The only thing in this podcast that we talked about that really like scares me is the, because we have this new tool that seems revolutionary to people, like the slow down in hiring juniors and I don't know if I can bring it up as a point to put any blame on ai.'cause I think businesses would find another reason to do that anyway. So I like, I dunno, maybe we'll have another podcast about like junior folks; people getting their start their first start Starting out. Yeah. Start starting out. Yeah. Yeah. We, it's harder, but it was even harder before. So you'll just like come to the interview and you show your resume. It's like, okay, you have a good degree, welcome on board. And then people learn stuff and people got jobs, people, some, I mean, let's be honest. It and software development and tech, tech field in general, it's not for everyone. I've seen people got into it spend their five years hating themselves every day and then eventually ended up exiting from the field. So it's not for everyone. So junior engineers even though if they're gonna be struggling to get a job. It's meant to be. Yeah. Maybe it's for good maybe you are good at some things. How many times in your career that happened when you had like dream job that you applied, it was like, oh my God, that's my dream job everything's gonna be perfect if I get this job. But you didn't get this job. And then, but later on you get better job. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you're like, oh, thanks God, I didn't make a job, did the job, because otherwise I won't be here. So same thing with junior engineers. Whoever's meant to be software engineer, they'll survive. They'll find jobs, they will flourish and they will be successful. If you are software engineer, if you are a student who want to software engineering for money alone, but not for let's say passion, then it's gonna be hard for you, you know? I agree. I definitely agree with that one. Well, we, like we've gone all around the world but I think we all definitely finished this podcast agreeing that it's another tool like use it to be more effective in the world. Use it to make a difference. Use it to stand out. And if you don't want to use it well, good luck. And let us know what you think about this podcast down in the comments below and as well as other ideas that you may have that you'd like us to tackle. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah. Thank you for Coming!