> Wishful thinking by the managerial class.
Heh. I wouldn't be so fast in calling this one, yet. It might go either way, or a combination of the two, who knows... Things are moving and progressing fast enough to at least be wary of, and keeping an eye on things. I wouldn't be surprised of any outcome, tbh.
On the one hand, PMs get to hone in a set of skills that include lots of juggling resources, bridging the gap between stake holders and people that execute, work with different layers of technical expertise, lots of back and forth and so on. Having to "call" a thing after talking to 5 people from 6 different PoVs is interestingly something that could make them quite good at using "AI". They're already used to working with "jagged expertise" so to say. And that's really close to what "agents" do today. You might get a session where claude/gpt/gemeni turns out a brilliant piece of technical artefact, or you might get an average piece of content that misses key important aspects that a "human" could see from a mile away.
On the other hand, LLMs do one thing quite well: they raise the floor of what "minimum effort" in a thing gets you. So things like language barriers, basic processes, procedures, etc. get elevated to a level where you can use these tools and be better off than not using these concepts at all. So a very talented engineer that previously had these issues, could now use LLMs to get better at auxiliary but "unimportant" aspects of integrated that technical experience into other places. In a "90% of the time people expect this to work like this" way, but with the floor being raised. One quick example of this would be a technically sound piece of software that now has bare-minimum ux/ui from this century, instead of "engineer GUI" aspect :)
Who knows where this all goes. Yesterday there was an article here about someone taking a bunch of languages, asking an agent to mix concepts from all of them and slop a "new uber language" design. Is it the ultimate language that many have tried before? 99% sure it's not. Or at least this one won't be. But there's a chance, with how many people can now prompt their way to a PoC quite quickly, that we eventually get something cool. No idea how that'd look like, but it's likely the "you'll know it when you see it" kind of thing.