> What makes this anecdote hard to believe is that seemingly two things happened simultaneously

What i described is what happened. I don’t appreciate the undertones where you are insinuating that i’m lying for whatever reason.

> The layperson was able to to steer the session(-s) into full PM/PO mode ideating, refining and explaining features and ideas

You call it steering. I would call it falling into that grove. Probably tiny things in the initial message made the first response more likely to be a clarifying/ideating type. And once that happened the conversation was gaining momentum in that direction and neither participant was trying to guide it in a different one.

> the user must have been proactively co-operating (say sidetracked) on not achieving the stated goal.

Exactly. The LLM itself sidetracked her. They were just talking about cool features they could add, and at no point did she put down her feet and say “stop asking more questions and just write the code”.

It can be a combination of many things. Attitude (some people hate to be rude, and not answering a question feels a bit rude). It can also be that she enjoyed the process of unpacking and elaborating on the idea.

The meaning of the story is not that no lay person can possibly develop using AI. That would be silly, and untrue. I know clear counter examples. The point is that if you don’t know what you don’t know it is harder to steer the AI in the direction you could very easily with the right lingo.