Recently, I had to do an integration with a Chinese API for my company. I used Codex to do the whole thing.
Yet, there is no way a product manager without any coding experience could have done it. First, the API needed to communicate to the main app correctly such as formatting, correcting data. This required human engineer guidance and experience working with expected data. AI was lost. Second, the API was designed extremely poorly. You first had to make a request, then retry a second endpoint over and over again while the Chinese API did its thing in the background. Yes, I had to poll it. I then had to do load testing to make sure it was reliable (it wasn't). In the end, I gave a recommendation that we shouldn't rely on this Chinese company and back out of the deal before we send them a huge deposit.
A non-technical PM couldn't have done what I did... for at least a few more years. You need a background and experience in software development to even know what to prompt the AI. Not only that, in the last 3 years, I developed an intuition on where LLMs fail and succeed when writing code.
I still have a job. My role has changed. I haven't written more than 10 lines of code in a day for months now. Yes, it's kind of scary for software devs right now but I'm honestly loving this as I was never the kind of dev who loved the code, just someone who needed to code to get what I wanted.
Yet, there is no way a product manager without any coding experience could have done it. First, the API needed to communicate to the main app correctly such as formatting, correcting data. This required human engineer guidance and experience working with expected data. AI was lost. Second, the API was designed extremely poorly. You first had to make a request, then retry a second endpoint over and over again while the Chinese API did its thing in the background. Yes, I had to poll it. I then had to do load testing to make sure it was reliable (it wasn't). In the end, I gave a recommendation that we shouldn't rely on this Chinese company and back out of the deal before we send them a huge deposit.
A non-technical PM couldn't have done what I did... for at least a few more years. You need a background and experience in software development to even know what to prompt the AI. Not only that, in the last 3 years, I developed an intuition on where LLMs fail and succeed when writing code.
I still have a job. My role has changed. I haven't written more than 10 lines of code in a day for months now. Yes, it's kind of scary for software devs right now but I'm honestly loving this as I was never the kind of dev who loved the code, just someone who needed to code to get what I wanted.