Today, during our team meeting, we had a discussion about the AI tools we use. I’d like to organize some of my ad-hoc thoughts from that discussion and share them here.
Why Do We Need Designers?
In a few of my recent docs, I’ve been using Figma to generate design mocks. The workflow is extremely quick and simple:
“Here is a screenshot of ICPC. Please help me add a new page for ….”
Figma doesn’t just give me a static design; it produces a functional mock with clickable buttons that I can quickly iterate on in minutes.
This makes me wonder: why do I still want to spend so much time explaining my idea to a designer if the result isn’t drastically better?
Every Manager Can Be An IC
When someone spends most of their time on people management, they specialize in it. And over time, they can lose their edge as an engineer.
With AI, that barrier to coding is dropping close to zero.
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, mentioned during last week’s Q&A that a new manager joining Anthropic started landing code on their second day. That used to be rare.
Now, “getting your hands dirty” is easier than ever. The boundary between IC and manager is blurring.
Onboarding Cost Collapsing
I opened a new repo that Justin and Diana had started. No digging through wikis. No asking around. No waiting for someone to explain where things live and how they work.
One Claude question got me up to speed in seconds. A second prompt produced an implementation of the missing feature I needed—faster than waiting for Justin to even confirm whether it was implemented.
I stared at the code longer than it took to generate it, trying to nitpick things. I couldn’t. It was flawless.
The barrier to context switching is collapsing.
The barrier to understanding a new codebase is collapsing.
The cost of switching teams is collapsing.
Everybody Can Join Oncall
Small customer requests I don’t want to deal with? I can now create a task and assign it to DevMate. The customer is happy, so am I.
User questions that I don’t know the answer to? I can now ask RM Detective and relay the response. It is so much faster than me digging through wikis, even those written by myself.
Anybody can be oncall. Anybody can enjoy oncall.
In this new era, small issues or big issues, we’ll fix them all.
Why Do We Need PM & TPM?
Why do we need PMs to spell out exactly how a Quotable Group or OQ Reservation should work? Why spend so much time debating Cloud Object vs. Capella?
Let’s build and ship. If it doesn’t work, we iterate.
We do market research because we’re afraid of building the wrong thing, because we want to be sure we’re investing in the right product. But as the speed of building improves so much, the careful “market-research-first” approach starts to become obsolete.
Are We In A Bubble?
People worry that we’re in a bubble.
Are we?
No. We’re at the beginning of another revolution. Individual productivity will increase 10x. The productivity of human society as a whole will increase 10x. It’s starting in the software industry, just like the people who first invented electricity were the first to use it. But it will spread like wildfire.
In 2026, do you use AI tools? If the answer is Yes, there’s absolutely nothing to be proud of.
In 2026, do you not use AI tools? Then you have every reason to worry.
Specialist to Generalist
Over the years, we created specialized roles to increase productivity.
With AI, everybody is a generalist. Everybody can be a builder.
The limit is our creativity.
So why wait? Let’s imagine a better world, build and ship!