iridione

The companies cutting headcount because of AI often just aren’t creative enough to expand their portfolio. There, I said it.

Today, even someone with minimal context can ship end-to-end prototypes. That means existing employees, the people with actual domain knowledge should be able to innovate faster than ever. Anthropic has shipped one of the best coding agents on the market and still has hundreds of engineering roles open.

High-agency people with company context and ideas within each company should be getting amplified right now, not laid off. Instead they're stuck figuring out how to "tokenmaxx" because leadership mandated it and they are forced to ship software no one will use in order to keep their jobs.

This is neat! Now I'm curious, what's left to innovate in the coding agent space? Sure there are the usual suspects like maintenance, security, reliability and other scalability improvements and looks like they will be addressed in the next year or two.

Interesting! I wonder how UI will evolve in the long-term? If there are browser-use/computer-use and clicky-clones automating pointer actions, do we really need complex UI anymore? If yes, when?

Ask The W https://askthew.com/

Cursor for AI PMs/Forward Deployed PMs.

A lot of engineers are trying to build the “Cursor for PMs.” As an engineer-turned-PM with several YOE in both roles, I appreciate their intent, but most are not solving the elephant in the room for the next generation of PMs, so I decided to step in.

Engineers wrote code. Designers produced design artifacts. Product Managers HAD to write PRDs as a way of communicating intent to gain alignment across teams; it was never their only job (would’ve been easy if it was!). The PRD was the means to the end, not the end itself, which is where most engineers are stuck building another AI-native text editor to become the next Cursor for PMs.

Today’s AI tools can generate PRDs, fancy roadmaps, complex spreadsheets, beautiful decks, and no-context OKRs, but the real job of PMs was always quick alignment, principled decision-making, and leadership buy-in with little to no data, something no AI tools can reliably solve today. We now have a unique opportunity to (potentially) solve these big, hairy problems with AI. I’m starting with orchestrating humans and agents to make better decisions.

Loving it so far. AI tools make me wish there were more hours in a day!

What's an example of a messy judgement call?