Lucas Kostka: AI will merge product and engineering roles
A Cloudflare engineer argues AI commodifies both coding and product management, threatening PMs unless they develop architecture skills.
What to know
- Kostka argues AI commodifies routine coding and PM work, threatening mediocre practitioners in both roles while predicting they will merge as code becomes cheap.
- Hacker News commenters counter that PMs perform irreplaceable human work: stakeholder management, customer outreach, go-to-market strategy, and judgment calls that AI cannot fully automate.
- Real-world reports show engineers absorbing PM responsibilities at existing pay rates, but also note that poor-quality AI-generated products still require human review and reasoning to ship.
- The debate hinges on whether PM value lies in execution (replaceable by AI) or strategy and human coordination (harder to automate).
The dispute Whether AI threatens PM roles hinges on whether product value derives from rapid feature execution (AI advantage) or from judgment, strategy, and irreplaceable human relationships (PM advantage). · positions read across 17 posts and comments
PM role is fundamentally secure because it requires irreplaceable human skills like stakeholder management and customer empathy.
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“Product managers is not just about making product features. It's a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers.”
soontimes · Hacker News ↗
AI can produce code quickly, but cannot replace judgment, tradeoffs, or customer feedback loops; human review and reasoning remain mandatory.
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“AI helps a lot and is great at certain well defined tasks, but the 'AI team' at my small org launched a new product very fast and very buggy. Customers were pissed. They had to go back to reading the code and applying some thinking and…”
popkkksidhd · Hacker News ↗
Engineers are already absorbing PM work in practice, expanding their roles without additional compensation.
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“at my company they are trying to get us engineers to absorb that role so now we spend a lot of our time doing meetings and human interactions like this with other parts of the business and making decisions…i'm now a devops/product/dev…”
thousand_nights · Hacker News ↗
Lucas Kostka Programmer, Cloudflare
How it unfolded 7 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlespostscomments
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7
Senior leaderOrganizational coordination work resists elimination
A manager at a large company noted that while some PM functions could be distributed, the coordination, escalation, and stakeholder management roles—particularly for technical program managers—remain valuable because executives respond to human judgment and persistence in ways they do not to automated systems.
“if you remove product managers, other folks in the company will need to do the jobs product managers would do…A director will ignore the message sent by an AI bot, but will definitely not ignore a message to sent to them by a TPM with management in email.”
— returnInfinity -
if you remove product managers, other folks in the company will need to do the jobs product managers would do. everyone doing a subset of that work.I thought TPMs were useless, but on a large project, you need somebody nagging everyone and sending updates to senior leadership..A director will ignore the message sent by an AI bot, but will…
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CounterpointPMs gain advantage by becoming founders
A commenter reframed the threat as an opportunity, arguing that AI tools allow product managers to transition into founding their own companies, shifting the competitive calculus from replacement to independence.
“Product Managers figure out what people want. Using AI they can easily transition to become founders.”
— dzink -
I'm a software engineer and never had a job with a dedicated product manager for the first decade of my career. I hate to use the E word here ("empathy") because people say it performatively too often for my taste but to me it's the key to success in this capacity. People will tell you a lot if you listen and choose to engage with them on a…
2 more of the top 3 · 6 posts in this stretch
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The real question for executives is: engineer + AI or PM + AI?I certainly believe that decent engineers do already have a good degree of knowledge about product topics (it’s like a must nowadays). PM/POs don’t really know enough on the tech side, so they would be clueless even with claude.
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“It’s a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers.”Don’t worry, human interaction is very complicated. Thankfully there are no llm models/google/xai with technology to do exactly that. Your pearls are safe.
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Engineer reports expanded role absorption without pay increase
A software engineer described their company assigning them product and DevOps work alongside coding, expanding their scope without additional compensation. The engineer noted the trend may vary by industry and expressed mixed feelings—finding it meaningful but recognizing it as a potential exploitation of AI productivity gains.
“at my company they are trying to get us engineers to absorb that role so now we spend a lot of our time doing meetings and human interactions like this with other parts of the business…i'm now a devops/product/dev person and expected to do all of that at once for the same pay as before…”
— thousand_nights -
at my company they are trying to get us engineers to absorb that role so now we spend a lot of our time doing meetings and human interactions like this with other parts of the business and making decisionsidk how common this is in the industry though, but since the introduction of AI my role has expanded so much beyond what is just writing code…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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Of course PMs aren't safe, but the article makes a great point why they're currently more relevant than ever!AI can now push new features at speed, but somebody still needs to steer those features into a desirable product. Customers will ask AI for a faster horse.This is why AI companies aren't spinning out new companies left and right. They can…
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Discussion widensAI cannot replace entire PM scope
Multiple commenters pushed back on the article's breadth of PM replacement, noting that product management spans customer outreach, go-to-market strategy, customer success, and customer feedback collection—domains where human presence and strategic thinking remain essential.
“Execution of an idea is not the only function of a PM. There is product development, customer feedback, outreach, go to market, customer success. I don't see how AI is wholesale replacing customer outreach & go to market…”
— avelis -
Execution of an idea is not the only function of a PM. There is product development, customer feedback, outreach, go to market, customer success. I don't see how AI is wholesale replacing customer outreach & go to market but I could be wrong.
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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>It's up to you to think that PM are better equipped when it comes to understanding why a feature make sense than a developer.Many developers don't want to think about these at all (and I say this as a former-developer-current-PM).
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users will get their problems solved directly by engaging with AI without needing software
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Critics cite AI-generated code quality issues in real deployments
A commenter noted that at their organization, an AI team launched a new product quickly but with significant bugs that frustrated customers. The team had to apply manual review and thinking to ship a working product, suggesting AI alone cannot handle product tradeoffs without human oversight.
“AI helps a lot and is great at certain well defined tasks, but the 'AI team' at my small org launched a new product very fast and very buggy. Customers were pissed.”
— popkkksidhd -
Is it really that grim? AI helps a lot and is great at certain well defined tasks, but the “AI team” at my small org launched a new product very fast and very buggy. Customers were pissed. They had to go back to reading the code and applying some thinking and care to get a working product out. Still faster don’t get me wrong but there’s still a…
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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PMs ultimately take bets. Some to many will fail and if they are great a few will pay off in an excessive way. I have yet to see anything in the AI field that make better bets than my best PMs (I manage 50 of them) but as soon as I do the whole calculus changes. I joke with them about it. They also joke back it could happen to me (which it…
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Hacker News debatePM role demands human skills AI cannot replace
Commenters on Hacker News began contesting Kostka's thesis. Several argued that product management fundamentally requires human interaction, stakeholder management, and understanding customer needs—work that engineers typically resist and that AI cannot fully automate, limiting the scope of displacement.
“Product managers is not just about making product features. It's a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers.”
— soontimes -
Product managers is not just about making product features. It’s a job that requires lots of human interaction, and this part is notoriously complicated for engineers. Article states that a person coding the feature can build a product intuition, and that’s true, product is not sorcery, but from my experience most engineers are just not interested…
2 more of the top 3 · 3 posts in this stretch
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IMO if developers are “cooked” like you stated (would be nice to have more data tho) then certainly plenty of other white collar jobs are in even worse position. They are in a bit better position than many other corporate jobs when it comes to transfer of skills and learning new profession.
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This seems like a very doomer take. Hard to take this assessment seriously with absolutely no data or numbers to back this up. Especially since devs certainly don’t seem like they are going to be “cooked”.
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Lucas Kostka publishes essay on AI threat to product managers
Kostka, a programmer at Cloudflare, published an essay titled "Product Managers aren't safe either" arguing that generative AI threatens both developers and product managers. He compares the disruption to how Instagram displaced photographers, and predicts that cheaper code will cause product and engineering roles to merge, with engineers taking on PM responsibilities.
“Code spitters are cooked, let's be honest here and accept the fate so everyone can move on.”
— Lucas Kostka -
1 outlet Product Managers aren't safe either
first by HN Frontpage, 13d ago
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What people are saying 2 voices from 1 site · best of 17 · verbatim
- Will the economic incentive to reduce headcount eventually force engineers into PM work despite its complexity, or will the quality failures be too costly?
- If all products are built faster with AI, does differentiation collapse when everyone asks AI the same questions?
- Oct 30
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You're right that this is going to suck for the engineers who fit the stereotype, didn't like interacting with users, and would express that they just want to stay in the code.For the rest of us, that's not a problem.
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So what happens when everyone is building the "same" app because they ask the "same" question to AI, without actually using their understanding and creativity to be "different" ?