The PMs validate it, why do you think they don't read over it to make sure it fits what they want? You might say "well they're lazy, look why they didn't write enough detail to start off with" but for lots of people, reviewing something to make sure it's close to what they want and then tweaking it is much easier than writing it from scratch.
It's the equivalent of writer's block and is why a common advice given to writers is to put anything they can onto the page then edit it later.
> The PMs validate it, why do you think they don't read over it to make sure it fits what they want?
The PM has historically often not had a detailed enough mental model of the implementation to spot the hard parts in advance or a detailed enough mental model of the customer desires to know if it's gonna be the right thing or not.
Those are the things that killed waterfall.
You can use LLM tools to help you improve both those areas. Synthesizing large amounts of text and looking for inconsistencies.
But the 80th-percentile-or-lower person who was already not working hard to try to get ahead of those things still isn't going to work any harder than the next person and so won't gain much of a real edge.
I'm glad you mentioned it and TFA briefly mentioned waterfall. The second graph shown in the article with documentation overlapping the dev cycle, it's like the worse of both agile and waterfall. It's supposedly real-time waterfall.
Normally waterfall works where the scope is extremely-well defined and articulated in design plans. Which shortens dev time because prior to AI code was mostly deterministic. Here we have to do waterfall level of documentation while iterating on a non-deterministic solution (code gen) to non-deterministic requirements (per usual).
It's bonkers.
I still think the technology is cool though.
And to answer the questioner.. Have you worked with a PM? Most of the ones I've worked with try to be simultaneously in charge yet not responsible for anything. Validating something implies skill and responsibility.
Then they're just bad PMs and don't deserve to have the job. That can be said in any profession, devs or lawyers or doctors who blindly accept LLM output without review are bad employees.
> Then they're just bad PMs and don't deserve to have the job.
Nobody "deserves" anything. They do have the jobs though. Thinking that the world isn't full of people doing what they need to do to get by who don't give a shit about fitting a fantasy ideal is wild.
Deserving and having are two different things, that doesn't mean they can't be criticized either way. By the same logic bad devs and bad dev practices can also be criticized.
"They're bad PMs" does not meaningfully respond to people saying the world is full of bad PMs. They know. It was already given. Giving it again in response isn't engaging thoughtfully.
I think validating a fully generated novel of a ticket, is much harder than thinking through the problem in the first place and creating your own ticket.
We see it with code too right? It’s harder to review code than to write it.
On top of that the LLM can work so fast that the amount of things that need validating grows!
This is where humans get lazy and the problems come in IMO. Whether its a PM not validating their ticket, or a dev doing a bad code review.
Add on to that that the incentives currently are to move fast and trust the AI.
It becomes clear to me that a lot of that review work either won’t be done at all, or won’t be nearly thorough enough.
The tickets are not "novel"-length, they are about a few bulleted lists of the sections I mentioned above. In that case it is indeed way easier to review that a ticket only saying "do X with Y data."
Reviewing code is harder than reviewing text because code does something and has interdependencies and therefore must be correct in its function, do not mix the two. This is like saying an editor reviewing an article or novel is harder than actually writing the novel which is blatantly incorrect.
Most real tickets are more complicated than “Do x with Y data” and also have many interdependencies throughout the business
Most? That's doubtful especially when a lot of tickets are simply CRUD which are fine being generated by an LLM. Those that are more complex require more review and interdependency management, sure, but to say that that is most tickets is simply not correct.
I agree. I hate getting tickets like this because they’ve often gone down the wrong path and I have to work backwards to understand the actual problem and the right way to solve it
> The PMs validate it, why do you think they don't read over it to make sure it fits what they want?
Hahahahahaha. Sorry, I couldn't help myself; this reads like satire. The answer is "real life experience says otherwise".
Yeah I was so tempted to ask if this person has ever actually met a project/product manager...
Maybe you both just have bad PMs, because just like good devs they should also be reviewing their work. My point was that it is more likely for PMs to review and edit a generated ticket than to have to write it all themselves which they often won't do.
> My point was that it is more likely for PMs to
I feel compelled to point out to you that this is a completely unsustainable, unsupportable, unsubstantiable claim. You have met ~0% of PMs, and of the ones you've met maybe you've experienced a non-zero percentage of their work, but statistically that's also very unlikely.
If you think you can say what most PMs do or what PMs are likely to do, then, I'm sorry, but you are not even thinking like an engineer. You're thinking, actually, a lot more like a PM to many of us.
> just like good devs
I'm so sorry, my sides just can't handle the starry-eyed nature of these takes. This is just too much for me.
To many of us this reads like you've never met people before. But who knows, maybe you live in Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average! If so then we're jealous, but you still should be more careful about how unrigorous your mental model is because it will make you a worse engineer.
Experience with different PMs and developers aside, the older you get in the profession the more you will hopefully realize that none of your quality effort fantasy matters. Sales happen and money rolls in independently of whether you think the PMs or the people who call themselves engineers do a "good job". Businesses thrive on sales and marketing, not engineering.
What a strange response. By your logic you've met ~0% of developers too yet I assume you can distinguish good development practices from bad. I also mentioned good PMs which by definition review and write good tickets with a clear explanation of the problem and what they want the solution to be. If personally meeting millions of people is the epistemic standard you have to know something then I'm not sure how you know anything at all.
As to your latter point, not sure why you think I think business doesn't continue on even with bad employees, of course it does and I didn't say otherwise. But that does not mean they're doing a good job, those two are orthogonal concepts.
And I'm not sure how we even got to this, the original point was that I personally as a dev can physically see PM productivity increasing with AI, even as other devs in this thread seem not to. For a competent PM, a tool that automates a detailed first draft fundamentally changes the psychology of ticket creation. If your argument is just "bad PMs will still be bad," then sure, I agree, but that doesn't really engage with how the tooling changes the workflow for everyone else.
> yet I assume you can distinguish good development practices from bad
Uh. We're not talking about knowing what good is, which is completely irrelevant to anything in this thread. You made a claim without qualification about what it is more likely for PMs to do. I can't tell if you've lost the chain or are engaging in some kind of motte and bailey fallacy. Either way it's a bad sign for this conversation.
I'm going to summarize the threads so far. I hope it highlights why what you've said sounds so silly:
Someone: "I see X failing to do Y."
You: "X definitely do Y. Why would you think that X aren't doing Y? Doing Y is the obvious thing for X to do."
Someone: "I literally am seeing it happen right now."
You: "Well then those X are bad."
Someone: "Yeah, no shit. They just said as much."
You: "But most X would do Y."
Someone: "In my experience that is false."
Someone else: "Mine too."
Someone else: "Mine as well."
Someone else: "Same."
You: "The bad ones shouldn't have their jobs."
Someone: "They do though."
You: "But we can tell which ones are the bad ones."
Someone: "Bartender, another drink please."
just this week i pushed back on some requirements in a very detailed product spec I was implementing to speed up time to ship. The pm had no idea what I was talking about because the requirements were invented by an LLM. This is not a bad PM, discipline doesn't scale.