Product manager skills do not overlap much with dev skills.

If I put some devs in front of a customer I'd be very much afraid of them doing what they ask rather than what they want, for instance, or overindexing on one particular customer's problem.

If the devs understand and can empathise with the users and there aren't a lot of them, sure, maybe but on most projects it's more effective to have the distilled and filtered customer feedback from a PM who is good at being a PM.

It feels economically naive because theyre presuming LLMs are magical boxes that replace humans.

I doubt 99% of what a nurse does would be meaningfully aided by an LLM and where it would help it'd probably be a crappy band aid around a bigger festering issue anyway (e.g. poorly managed IT, deliberately confusing insurance processes).

already happening and it seems it is legal https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/citizens-are-tracki...

Another area that's also existed for quite a while is the crowd-sourcing of the positions of mobile speed traps.

Though bizarrely in the UK that's legal if you do it via Waze, not if you do it via whatsapp.

we have literal "starving authors" - they pretty much all need second jobs to survive.

for the authors themselves I don't see much difference between having no copyright at all and being thrown a few pennies on their work from amazon. either way the ability to make a living from those pennies clearly isnt motivating them.

the future jk rowlings of the world will still buy lottery tickets to fame and fortune whether or not she ends up being worth $20 million (weak/no copyright) or $1 billion (strong copyright).

"Artists don't deserve to build wealth off of their own work" is certainly one point-of-view.

that's one way to wilfully misrepresent what I said.

the point of view was that they already aren't.

i think product just uses these use cases as their example demos and then when they show it to marketing theyre like "OK I guess this is what it's for".

(at least, this is what ive seen)

I think most people miss the point of TDD. It is not just about edge cases. It ought to be:

* A way of matching requirement use cases to tests.

* to modulate the number of tests written not only to make sure you have enough coverage but also to make sure you don't pointlessly cover the same edge cases multiple times.

* a way to cheaply provide feedback and validation on code as you are writing it.

With AI the ability to churn out useless tests has exploded (both with TDD done badly and with no TDD at all) and that has actually incurred a new type of cost we didnt have to face before.

I remember having a conversation with somebody from the BBC about a study they commissioned once to ask license payers about how the license fee was spent.

the overwhelming response apparently was:

* we don't have particular concerns about how the license fee is spent.

* we mainly just want that money back

This paper created some neat theoretical mathematical models but I can't see anything that indicates that they have anything to do with reality.

I thought they'd come up with a neat mechanism that looked at actual wages in real companies where automation was introduced, but no. It's all spherical cows.

Isn't that how most economics works? All spherical cows that conveniently prove whatever is good for your boss's boss's boss's boss's wallet, and you get paid handsomely.

not all, but far too much of it. card/krueger is a good example of a study that tried to measure real cows in a smart way.

the boss's wallet and plenty of economists who made their career off supporting it were very upset about that one and tried to deny it.

they make mistakes on this level when writing code too it's just that some people can't tell when they do it and refuse to believe they do it.

This is like saying "writing code is solved, all we need now is somebody to blame because it doesnt work"

That's really where we're heading, though. We're mostly at the point that, for a lot of code, the humans are there for manual testing and not creating the code.

At some point it will become a strong competitive advantage to zag where others zig.

If you understand the codebase deeply and have trust in it can roll out changes quickly without manual testing you can run circles around the people scratching their heads wondering if this vibe coded 2,500 pull request is going to be the one that takes down the system for a day.

Have you ever written significant changes by hand without testing?

Ive written many significant changes without manual testing by leaning heavily on well crafted automated tests, carefully honed type systems and clean architecture. These foundations serve as the bedrock of high quality applications I can move fast on.

IME vibe coding isnt just not capable of building these foundations, it actively chips away at them where they already exist. shrug

You can ask for tests.

sure i can get all sorts of very poor quality tests by asking for them