The Product Manager Is Dead. Long Live the Product Developer.
The person who walks into the room with Figma mockups and says 'build this' has run out of runway. AI collapsed the d...
The End of Coding is the Return of Product Development
3 min read
The Chains Are Off
13.03.2026, By Stephan Schwab
For fifty years, we have been bogged down in the syntax mines, confusing "typing" with "product development." AI has shattered those chains. This is not the end of our profession — it is the moment we finally take command of it. The chore is dead. The time for true Product Development has arrived.
Let the C-suite panic. They are asking: “If ChatGPT can write the code, why am I paying you?”
Look them in the eye and answer: “You were never paying me to type. You were paying me to understand the problem so deeply that I could stop you from destroying the company with it.”
It is a question that reveals the flaw in our titles. “Software Engineer” was always a California term for a higher salary bracket. The real job — the one that AI cannot replace — is Software Product Developer.
For decades, we have been acting as a “Translation Layer.” We took business intent and manually humiliated ourselves by translating it into semicolon-perfect syntax. It was drudgery. It was slow. And worst of all, it gave us an excuse to be technicians instead of architects.
Now, the translation is free. The AI has repealed the tax on syntax. The chains are off.
The Unfinished Battle
We are back in 1968, at the Garmisch conference where “Software Engineering” was born. They didn’t coin that term because they wanted better variable names. They coined it because they were terrified.
"The major cause of the software crisis is that the machines have become several orders of magnitude more powerful! ... programming has become a gigantic problem." — Edsger W. Dijkstra
They saw a future where complexity would drown us. And for 50 years, we lost that battle. We were too busy debugging syntax errors to fight the war on complexity.
Now, the difficulty of writing code is gone. AI has removed the governor. You can generate a million lines of chaos in an afternoon. This is the danger. But it is also the opportunity.
Seize the Authority
"When the cost of producing code drops to zero, the value of verifying code rises to infinity."
“Coding” was manual labor. It let us hide. It let us say, “I’m just working on the ticket.”
No more. Now that the robots lay the bricks, you must be the Architect. You must be the Product Developer.
It is time to take back the authority.
- Dictate the Model: Do not ask the AI to “write a login function.” Command it to implement a specific security model that you designed.
- Enforce the Invariants: You are the guardian of the system’s integrity. The AI is your tireless junior who will happily introduce a race condition if you don’t catch it.
- Own the Outcome: If the AI writes the bug, you shipped it. Step up.
Do Not Be a Glorified Typist
Do not humiliate yourself by becoming a “Prompt Engineer.” That is just the old clerical work in a new dress. Tweaking a text string to trick a model is beneath you.
True product development in the AI era is about Command and Verification.
You must be able to specify the system with such rigor that you can prove the AI’s output is correct. If you cannot read code, and you cannot reason about failure domains, you are not “augmented.” You are obsolete. As we discussed in Technical Practices That Drive Business Results, rigorous verification is the only way to survive the speed of AI generation.
Reclaiming the Title
The “Coder” is dead. Let it die. It was a clerical job masquerading as a creative one.
The “Software Product Developer” is the only one who survives. The person who understands the domain, models the constraints, and assumes responsibility for the system’s behavior in the real world.
The tools have changed. The mission remains. Stop typing. Start Developing.
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