Quoting Dan Shipper's Big AI Takeaways

Quoting Dan Shipper's big AI takeaways (via)

    1. Automation is a lie—every automation needs a human. Dan's company doubled in size this year despite being incredibly AI-forward.
  • Why? Because in order to make automation work well, you need humans making sure everything keeps working.
  • This is why benchmarks are misleading—they measure AI on problems we've already framed and can score, but there's always a higher frame.

The code writes itself fast, sure. But keeping the machine aimed is a full-time human job: the review gates, the CI/CD, the project scaffolding, the file where every mistake gets written down. I live a miniature version of that forward-deployed role today, and yeah, it still feels like babysitting.

It's the part that can't be automated, because automating it would just create more of itself. The mechanical work gets shaved away; what stays is someone to guide the machine and say "this is what we're building." It's also why benchmarks are misleading: they measure AI on problems we've already framed and scored. The frame is still ours.

    1. PMs will win the AI era.
  • Marcus, a former PM who previously ran Axios's writing product, joined Every after getting super AI-pilled.
  • Now he runs their product Spiral, and ships faster than anyone on the team.
  • He pairs technical knowledge with spiky product sense, deep user empathy, and an eye for what matters.
  • Dan thinks any PM who gets really AI-native will be incredibly dangerous because the building is done for you—what matters is figuring out what to build and if it's great.
  • Forward-deployed engineers are the new most essential role.
  • The big model companies have teams of people managing their internal agents, and those teams aren't going away.
  • It's different from traditional software building, and certain engineers love it.
  • As models get better, this role will evolve—you'll be managing more agents doing more things.

I see this in my own job as a senior engineer, where the work is shifting from "how to build" to "what to build." The how is becoming mechanical; most new changes could ride a coding agent end to end. What the agent can't do is everything around the code: it doesn't have taste, doesn't hold the architecture, doesn't have the system overview. So the job converges on the part that stays human, driving what exactly gets created.

That same collapse is happening outside engineering. Designers are opinionated about how a transition should land or how a screen gets customized, things they used to hand to a developer. Now they ship it themselves, and so do PMs. The titles didn't change, but the line between who decides and who builds got a lot blurrier: anyone with strong opinions about how a project gets made can ship them, to a much wider extent than their job description used to allow.

Backend, frontend, PMs; those roles didn't always exist. Once agents can be relied on 24/7 in real projects, they won't exist in this shape for long.