My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs

Meta, and other large companies have been encouraging PMs to code, while I've seen many negative responses from engineers having to code review, debug, deal with production issues, etc. stemming from crappy code they don't understand. Metrics and KPIs are being gamed into stupid incentives like lines of code, commits, and tickets closed. Leadership claims they are aware of Goodhart's Law, but their actions show otherwise.

Overall the rise of business types in tech company leadership has led to a drop in engineering quality, a rise in short term metrics, and fiascos like the COVID overhiring into multiple rounds of layoffs.

Our job is done for. We will be shown the door, and everyone will rejoice. Everyone will live in a happy world where you'll doddle a house and Claude will build you a next generation SaaS that makes you millions. Managers will do the job of engineers, by just telling LLMs to make an app or to make money or something. C-suites will have agents doing the jobs of managers, and CEOs will run entire companies with a Claude $200 subscription alone. It is truly the next thing, and the future, probably happening in the next 2 years, or in 2 years in 2 years.

Yesterday I had an interview, but I got rejected. They decided to go for a manager with a Claude subscription who vibe-coded a weather app.

This is the end of software engineering.

A friend at Meta -- long before the age of LLMs -- got paged at 3am for a site issue. When he found the PR that caused the bug, the testing section for the change simply said:

YOLO!

This was well into the "Move fast with stable infra" era of Meta, but clearly that still encouraged "Move fast and break things" for everything beyond infra.

PMs landing Prod diffs sounds like even more moving fast shall ensue.

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.

I get that "landing a prod diff" means "get stuff in production"? I never read this before. Is this slang unique to meta?

I generally agree with the take. At the moment the models and agents aren’t good enough for someone who isn’t trained to build and maintain a production system. So as long as Eng isn’t significantly more bandwidth starved than PM, PM’s writing production code is not a high leverage activity.

The key issue right now is that the models falter in the last mile, and the last mile is where you need the training and experience to make sure the thing that lands is production quality.

At some point in the next few years I believe the roles will merge. I suspect that PMs will be forced to specialize towards a discipline (design, data science, engineering, etc.) while engineers will also start to see more of their responsibilities covering former PM territory. Most engineers will probably become closer to “product engineers”.

I think it depends on the company. In large companies, the role of PM probably won’t change that much. However, PMs who are technical and hands-on can bring significantly more value by leveraging AI tools.

There’s another path for PMs that the article and most of the comments don’t seem to mention.

Technical PMs are now in a great position to start their own companies. In the past, many were blocked or handicapped by the inability to code. With AI-assisted development, that barrier is much lower, which gives them a lot more leverage to build products themselves.

My hot take: the dedicated PM role is becoming optional. Engineers already understand feasibility and tradeoffs, and they often end up informing the PM anyway, which usually comes at the cost of meetings and slow decisions. With clear quarterly goals, engineering and design can own product together. They would shape scope, ship in increments, measure, and iterate. So the "product" function still exists, but its not a separate PM attached to it.

The linked article on evals is even more interesting.

I think technical PMs or product oriented developers are the future most valuable people.

I remember this post. But I'm not sure what the future really entails and I suspect it'll be very company/culture dependent. In some companies, the engineers are very savvy and understand the business well. In others, it's the designers. Or sales. Ops. And of course Product Managers. You get the picture.

Whoever gets the business best (and in detail) will likely be the best builders. It's "intuition as evals" that really matters in the end. You think Software Engineers or Product Managers are replacing Quants at trading shops anytime soon? Nope.

Hot take: only PMs need to code now. With Claude 4.6 Opus, the engineer skill set is no longer useful. Why are we hiring people with code writing ability when code writing ability has no value anymore?

PMs in Meta-scale companies vs. startups has always been different, and they are diverging even more as AI gets better.

In startups anything goes. PMs and engs do whatever it takes to ship and scale the business. No one cares who's using AI in what way, as long as they're getting shit done.

In a place like Meta or Amazon, people also get more shit done with AI, but because these teams are huge, well-oiled machines, sudden productivity bumps or norm changes can drop overall productivity.

Totally agree with this post as long as it's limited to large, mature teams

> Why should PMs code? Better communicate the idea/feature

I think this is the main takeaway, but I'm curious how bad the PM must have been at communicating to begin with if this is necessary.

> Fun!!!!!

I noticed that AI evangelists really love to use word "fun" to describe anything they do with AI.

Claw people particularly seem really love to use that word when answering what practical or useful they do with AI agents. It's always something absurdly trivial followed by "and it's just fun!"

Don't really have any conclusion to this - just thought to share this observation.

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