Lenny Distilled

AI is reshaping everything - adapt urgently or become obsolete

Strategy → Vision & Mission

Defining
I believe that all product managers will be AI product managers in the future. And this is because we see all products needing to have a personalized experience, a recommender system that is actually good.
Supporting
When I think about agents, I think about these three things. So one, it's autonomy like being... And it's a spectrum, it's not a zero-one, it's how do I actually delegate things that it can do. Second, I think of as complexity. It's not a one-shot, 'Hey, summarize this document, generate this image, but it's build me this prototype or help me knock this meeting out of the park.' And then the third one I think of is it's a much more natural interaction.
Supporting
I think there's going to be way more programmers and way more engineers a few years from now. Pretty quickly. The form factor of what it means to be a programmer obviously is going to change, but at the end of the day, of course the discipline is all about just being able to tell your computer what's do. And so in that lens, I really think that programming is only going to become more and more important as AI gets more powerful.
Supporting

"It" refers to generative AI technology, which Schillace views as a transformative platform for building software applications.

Really transformative massive value will come from building apps and solutions that won't work at all without it, that treat it as a true platform.
Supporting
I think the way that the internet made distribution of information free, I think AI is going to make pixels free. So pixels are expensive to produce now, they take programmers and they take lots of infrastructure, and putting a pixel in front of the user is a hard thing to do and lots of software is predicated on that.
Supporting
The internet started with curation, often user curation. So you took something, some good like people or books or music, and you digitize it and you put it online and then you ask users to curate it. And that was your Facebook, Spotify, and so forth. And then after a while, the world switched from curation to recommendation, where instead of people doing that work, you had algorithms. And that was a big change that required us and others to actually rethink the entire user experience and sometimes the business model as well. And I think what we're entering now is we're going from your curation to recommendation to generation.
Nuanced
If you could choose the perfect model behavior, which model would you want? Do you want a model that says, 'You're absolutely right. There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email,' and it continues for 50 more iterations or do you want a model that's optimizing for your time and productivity and just says, 'No. You need to stop. Your email's great. Just send it and move on'?
Nuanced
We are in an ideal crisis. Now, we have all this really cool tools to do everything from scratch and have new design. It can have you write code. You can have new website. So in theory, we should see a lot more, but at the same time, people are somehow stuck. They don't know what to build.
Nuanced

"This notion" refers to the idea that AI isn't a cure-all solution, mentioned in the context of discussing AI productivity gains.

Companies that started just with AI startups mostly, but there is some truth to this notion that AI isn't a panacea and it's growing as well in capability. So you need to ride that wave along with it. A lot of companies aren't realizing this. They're like, 'Well, where's the value?' And the truth is the value is changing every day.

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