machine unlearning

(Edited with Claude)

I haven't coded professionally since 2018, but those late nights debugging in my college's CS lab “dungeon” are burned into my memory. A few weeks ago, I decided to experiment with AI-powered coding assistants to understand how they might fit into my Product Management workflow.

My first attempt was ambitious—I fed the same prompt to multiple assistants to compare their solutions. While there was magic in watching software appear from a few words, the results felt overly complicated. The UI choices were distracting, and I couldn't easily visualize the project structure. These tools excelled at helping me “work backwards” and refine my problem, but I wanted something more tangible.

So I simplified. I decided to build a basic personal website with Cursor, and managed to go from nothing to hosted in just a few hours. It blew my mind.

What Made the Difference

Cursor's agent provides enough abstraction to let me focus on what I want to build instead of how to code it. The integrated IDE eliminated constant context switching between tools, letting me stay in a flow state longer. I could focus on ideation and building without the usual tool-hopping friction.

Initially, I was hesitant to dive into an IDE. As a PM, I'm used to tools that enhance problem discovery and high-level planning—not getting deep into code. I worried that being too close to implementation would add unnecessary work to my plate. I also wasn't sure my rusty coding skills would be enough to make Cursor valuable.

What I discovered was the opposite. The time invested gave me a deeper understanding of the development process and made it easy to explore ideas without creating distractions. The agent made it less about knowing specific programming languages and more about clearly specifying what I wanted and debugging when things went wrong.

If you're intimidated: a basic intro programming course is enough to get started. These skills are very attainable for PMs and lead to better collaboration.

The Elephant in the Room

There's an unspoken tension when PMs start prototyping or mocking up experiences: are we overstepping into our designers' or engineers' responsibilities? At Apple, they called your direct responsibilities your “sphere of influence”—working outside it was a big no-no. It's a relic of the hierarchy that's been historically necessary to coordinate thousands of employees building for millions of customers.

The truth is, the person who'll excel at AI-assisted development is probably a TPM—someone who can identify customer problems worth solving while understanding enough about design, engineering, and testing to keep things moving. But I hesitate to even write this because there's so much pressure across roles to maintain relevancy, and these rigid role definitions are something the industry needs to evolve past.

At the end of the day, if a team is truly collaborating, there's very little ego about how they reached a solution.

Why This Matters

AI-powered coding assistants make me excited to build software again. With Cursor, I built something tangible quickly while learning along the way. I feel satisfied with what I created and motivated to turn more ideas into reality.

Bottom line: it's the most fun I've had coding, maybe ever.

I truly believe we're approaching a future where people currently labeled as “non-technical” will be capable of end-to-end software development. Don't let the big, bad, dark mode IDE stop you.