Claim◆Article · 3:39 — 5:09
The timeline between having an idea and building it has collapsed from months to weeks, so engineers need stronger product taste and business sense.
Cat Wu describes how the speed of AI-assisted coding has compressed the idea-to-implementation cycle, making product judgment more valuable than execution skill in most domains. ✦ AI generated
Cat Wu · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-21 · original ↗
Elicited by
“What's a piece of conventional software engineering that was true a year ago that you don't think holds anymore in this new world?”
Two years ago it was pretty typical for a product manager to go talk to a bunch of customers, align over the course of six months with cross-functional teams on some PRD, and write a thorough spec on exactly how we'll implement this before the first line of code gets written. Now things are completely turned the opposite way. For a lot of engineers, the push I would give to folks in the room is to develop more of your business sense and product sense on what it is we should build, because the timeline between having an idea and building it is so much shorter — it's down from six to twelve months to maybe even a week.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation
- ·Old timeline: 6–12 months from idea to first line of code
- ·New timeline: as short as a single week
- ·AI-assisted coding is the primary driver of this compression
- ·Building quickly is no longer the bottleneck
- ·Deciding what to build is the new scarce skill
- ·Engineers need stronger business and product sense
Around this claim
Context · 2
Claude Tag lands 65% of the product engineering PRs for the Claude Code team.Cat Wu · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 85%Systems thinking is becoming an increasingly critical skill for designers as products need composable building blocks rather than siloed experiences.Ian Silber · Lenny's Podcast · conf 70%
This moment responds to
extends → The way to offset the sense of grief or loss from AI taking over software engineering work is to be more ambitious about what you build.Thariq Shihipar · Simon Willison's Weblogextends → As AI absorbs more of the product development lifecycle, the enduring human contribution shifts toward vision, strategy, and judgment rather than execution, since people give AI bounded goals and constraints rather than asking it to originate strategy outright.Adam Mosseri · Lenny's Podcastexplains mechanism → Rewrites are now good, contrary to the conventional wisdom from The Mythical Man-Month.Thariq Shihipar · Simon Willison's Weblog