AI-assisted coding compresses the startup development loop, turning multi-month engineering projects into weekend builds. Prototypes that once took weeks can now be built in a single day, which makes a week-long wait for user feedback painfully slow. The bottleneck has shifted from implementation to deciding what to build. Teams are accelerating decision-making and increasingly relying on gut instincts. Effective product managers must bring deep customer empathy and form mental models of ideal customers. They must synthesize many signals and put themselves in users' shoes to rapidly choose product directions.
AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management, said Andrew Ng. The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said on an episode of the "No Priors" podcast published Thursday that AI-assisted coding has compressed the startup loop. Things that used to take six engineers three months to build, "my friends and I, we'll just build on a weekend," Ng said.
In the past, a prototype might take three weeks to develop, so waiting another week for user feedback wasn't a big deal. But today, when a prototype can be built in a single day, "if you have to wait a week for user feedback, that's really painful," Ng said. That mismatch is forcing teams to make faster product decisions - and Ng said his teams are "increasingly relying on gut."
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