Michael Williams

PREDICTION: THE CPO ROLE, AS WE KNOW IT, WILL VANISH IN FIVE YEARS At young AI native companies, the traditional PM role is on the wane, replaced with a product builder archetype that’s a combination of Product, Design and Engineering. These companies will never hire a CPO. A separate product leader leads to too much cognitive dissonance when the IC roles doing the actual work are blending, extra overhead and imposes an unnecessary coordination tax on the product development organization. Five years from now, these companies will be the leaders and set the cultural tone for the next generation, so my prediction is that all tech companies will stop hiring for the CPO role in five years. There will be a singular product development leader at each org. Ironically, this new role might still be called the CPO, except they will run the entire product development org. CPTO is far too unwieldy of a title and only exists today to alleviate confusion. Career implication: early / mid career product leaders need to stop aspiring to become CPOs. instead, you need to develop a panoply of product development skills across all three disciplines (+ analytics), be able to fluidly navigate the roles, and become a product builder, period. Farewell, CPO! It was a good 15-20 year run for this role in tech. But like everything else, it’s time to evolve.

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Best advice I could give someone job searching: Skip the job application. Email the hiring manager, executive, founder, or CEO and send them something related to the job: >> Doing the actual work >> Share the strategy >> Show execution >> Send an artifact, codebase, etc Show them you can do the job and you'll skip to the front of the line. Applications are a waste of time. Getting shit done gets noticed.

I've used ~$1100 in Opus/Sonnet API tokens over the last ~60 days Running this through Mythos instead would have cost about ~$7,850 (based on what we know re: pricing so far) $30-50k/mo in API credits per FT engineer seems likely at this rate

The next arms race for AI is going to be corporations fighting to secure as much inference as they can The demand will be about 100x more than is available soon, invest accordingly

This is your periodic reminder that the em dash (–) should be your favourite punctuation mark. Compare: If you offered young people four years at a prestigious university for free—on the condition that they could never mention they attended it—few would accept. with If you offered young people four years at a prestigious university for free, on the condition that they could never mention they attended it, few would accept. See the difference ? Commas get lost in the noise of your text. The em dash is much more distinctive. On my macbook, with a French Canadian keyboard, I generate the em dash with option-shift-equal. My AI tells me that for English speaking folks on a macBook, it is option-shift-hyphen. It tells me that under Windows, it is Windows + Shift + -. Try it. I learned about em dash from Silvia, in his book « How to write a lot ». He is the reason you get to read so much of my prose.

I am slowly coming around to AI assisted programming. I am genuinely trying to codify every rule about programming that I have and using that + several stages to build out small changes. Not sure the productivity changes, but I think I can see a modest gain in speed. I am also trying to be concerned about every line produced, not just slop trebucheting code over the wall.