With all these AI layoffs, my biggest fear isn’t Copilot making me obsolete, it’s wasting three months coding a feature my PM didn’t validate. The “build it and they will come” strategy just got brutally expensive. Are you guys pivoting hard to discovery/validation work now, or is it heads-down coding as usual? What’s the most complex thing you’ve seen your team build only to have it shelved?
It’s a convenient narrative. The layoffs are a cyclical correction disguised as ‘AI efficiency’ to appease Wall Street. We’re still being measured on velocity, not business value. My next sprint still has zero time budgeted for discovery calls
Been there. The 10x engineer was always the one who stopped the team from building stupid features. Now that AI writes the boiler plate, the human value is purely in defining the requirements. If you aren’t spending 50% of your time on ‘why’ and ‘for who,’ you’re a typing resource, not an engineer
The problem isn’t the PM not validating, it’s that leadership pushes a vision and PMs are too scared to ask users the hard questions that might contradict the roadmap. The complex thing we built that got shelved? The V2 of our core app that didn’t solve any new customer pain, but looked great in the board deck
This is a great chance for ICs to step up. When AI handles the how, the best engineers become mini-product owners. Learn to talk to customers, learn to run A/B tests, learn to read activation metrics. It’s a career upgrade, not a downgrade.
this is terrifying. My only goal was to write clean code, but now I feel like I need a business degree just to keep my job. What are some good, low-cost frameworks for validating an idea before I start the sprint?