I feel like I’m watching developers speed run project and product management learnings.
We’ve moved to seeing that specs are useful and that having someone write lots of wrong code doesn’t make the project move faster (lots of times devs get annoyed at meetings and discussions because it hinders the code writing, but often those are there to stop everyone writing more of the wrong thing)
We’ve seen people find out that task management is useful.
Now more I’m seeing talk of fully doing the design work upfront. And we head towards waterfall style dev.
Then we’ll see someone start naming the process of prototyping, then I’m sure something about incremental features where you have to ma age old vs new requirements. Then talk of how really the customer needs to be involved more.
Genuinely, look at what projects and product managers do. They have been guiding projects where the product is code yet they are not expected to read the code and are required to use only natural language to achieve this.
So right. All these guys have never been managers. Do you think humans don't write things that break? Or that teams sometimes take a wrong path and burn a week of work? Or months? Well now you can experience all of that in 30 minutes of vibecoding. As a former tech product manager, it feels EXACTLY the same.
Yes, lots of the process and problems and solutions to them are the same but we’ve just massively cut the cost of a part of development. That has huge ramifications about when it makes sense to tackle different things and how tradeoffs work out.
Was it strongdm talking about the dark factories? They were working on some integration software so needed to use google drive and slack and lots of other things. They fully reimplemented those to the level they needed for their tests - outside of the biggest firms this would probably have been an enormous time and money sink. Now it’s reasonable.
On a personal project, with my wife we wanted a tracker for holiday planning. Five minutes given a barely through through request and we had a working prototype, fixed bugs in seconds and then talked through with a model what we needed and how it did or didn’t fit (and we needed that first version to figure that out). It helped drive out actual requirements from us, prioritise them, choose a stack add tickets and then went ahead and implemented it pretty far. Have a mostly working v2 which has highlighted some details about what we really wanted. Total invested cost was one day of a $20 subscription and maybe half an hour of talking to a bot and checking results.
We’ve moved to seeing that specs are useful and that having someone write lots of wrong code doesn’t make the project move faster (lots of times devs get annoyed at meetings and discussions because it hinders the code writing, but often those are there to stop everyone writing more of the wrong thing)
We’ve seen people find out that task management is useful.
Now more I’m seeing talk of fully doing the design work upfront. And we head towards waterfall style dev.
Then we’ll see someone start naming the process of prototyping, then I’m sure something about incremental features where you have to ma age old vs new requirements. Then talk of how really the customer needs to be involved more.
Genuinely, look at what projects and product managers do. They have been guiding projects where the product is code yet they are not expected to read the code and are required to use only natural language to achieve this.