Charlie Brewer

The PM job used to be "figure out what's possible, then plan around it for 6 months." That assumption worked when the technology underneath your product moved slowly. Cat Wu runs product for Claude Code at Anthropic. She tested every new model by asking it to add a table tool to Excalidraw. Sonnet 3.5 failed. Opus 4 occasionally succeeded. Opus 4.6 does it reliably enough to demo live in front of thousands of developers. That progression happened in 16 months. METR measures this with time horizons: how long would a task take a human expert that AI can now complete half the time? Sonnet 3.5 (new) in October 2024: 21 minutes. Opus 4.6 in February 2026: roughly 14.5 hours. A 41x jump. If your roadmap is longer than the gap between model releases, you're planning around constraints that may not exist by the time you ship. Her team's response is worth studying. They replaced long-term roadmaps with "side quests," short self-directed experiments anyone on the team can run. Claude Code on Desktop, the AskUserQuestion tool, and todo lists all started this way. Someone prototyped it, internal users liked it, they shipped it. The most telling detail: when they first launched todo lists, the model couldn't reliably check off completed items. They added system prompt hacks to nudge it. Next model generation, the behavior came for free. They deleted the hacks. Their system prompt shrank 20% with Opus 4.6 alone. This is the part most PMs miss. Every workaround you build to compensate for a model limitation becomes dead weight the moment the next model drops. The simpler your implementation, the faster you absorb the next capability jump. The Venn diagram in the image tells the structural story. Before AI: Product hands to Design hands to Eng, sequential. With AI: all three overlap. Designers ship code. Engineers make product calls. PMs build prototypes. The handoff chain collapses because the cost of building a working demo dropped to an afternoon. Any PM still writing 30-page PRDs before touching a prototype is optimizing for a world where building is expensive. That world ended about 12 months ago.

Jensen Huang just called out every CEO who’s been firing people “because of AI.” Jim Cramer asked him why companies are laying people off if AI is supposed to make everyone MORE productive. Jensen's answer: "For companies with imagination, you will do more with more. For companies where the leadership is just out of ideas, they have nothing else to do. They have no reason to imagine greater than they are. When they have more capability, they don't do more." Read that again. The man who built the most important tech company on Earth just told you that if your CEO is using AI to cut headcount, it means one thing: They have no imagination. They have no vision for what comes next. They got handed the most powerful tool in human history and their FIRST instinct was to fire people. This is the CEO of NVIDIA. The company whose chips power every AI system on the planet. If anyone on Earth has the right to say "AI replaces workers," it's Jensen Huang. And he said the OPPOSITE. He said every carpenter could become an architect. Every plumber could become an architect. AI elevates capability. It doesn't eliminate it. But here's where it gets really interesting... During the same interview, Jensen revealed something nobody's talking about: He said AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are seeing their revenues increase by one to two billion dollars a WEEK. And he wishes these companies were public so the world could see what he sees. One to two billion per week. That's a $50 to $100 BILLION annualized run rate. For companies that most people think are burning cash and making nothing. The entire Wall Street narrative that "AI companies aren't profitable" might be completely wrong. Jensen sees their numbers. He sees their compute orders. He sees their growth. And he's saying the revenue is real. So if the money IS real, why are other companies firing people? Because they're not building AI products. They're not creating new revenue streams. They're not using AI to expand into new markets. They're using AI as an EXCUSE to cut costs because they ran out of ideas 3 years ago and need something to tell the board. Jensen's company added $500 billion in new orders in 5 months. He expects $1 trillion in cumulative revenue through 2027 from just two product lines. That number doesn't include the new chips, systems, or partnerships announced this week. And he's not cutting people. He's hiring. Because when you have imagination, more capability means MORE opportunity. Not less headcount. Meanwhile Salesforce cut thousands. Meta cut thousands. Amazon cut thousands. All blaming "AI efficiency." Jensen's response: You're out of imagination. He also said something that stuck with me. Cramer asked if he ever thought he'd build a $10 to $20 trillion company while waiting tables at Denny's. His answer: "I was just trying to make it through the shift." Biggest tip he ever got? Two, three dollars. Now he's building tech that increased computing demand by one million times in two years. He announced OpenClaw, which he says is as big as ChatGPT. And he's got 21 months of new business that isn't even counted in the trillion dollar figure yet. When asked how long he plans to keep working? "I'm hoping to die on the job. And I'm not hoping to die anytime soon." This is a man who believes every single thing he's building. And his message to every CEO using AI to justify layoffs is simple... You're not innovating. You're surrendering. The technology wasn't built to shrink companies. It was built to make them limitless. If your leadership can't see that, the problem isn't AI. It's THEM.