# AI-Era PM
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Becoming an AI-Era PM 05 | Leave It Vague and AI Will Fill the Gaps for You
This is the fifth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. You tell AI "build me a login," and in one breath it settles a dozen things you never mentioned: email or phone, how many wrong passwords before it locks, how long the lock lasts, what the error message says. AI doesn't ask you back the way a person would — it's a yes-machine: it does what you said, not what you meant. The moment a requirement goes fuzzy, it fills the gap with the most generic default, and that default is usually not the one you wanted. OpenAI's Sean Grove says code is only 10–20% of a developer's value; the other 80–90% is saying clearly what to build. This piece gives you four things you can actually do: swap adjectives for numbers, write out every state, list the edge cases, and self-check with a zero-context test.
Becoming an AI-Era PM 04 | Judging "Should We Build It" Now Costs More Than "Can We Build It"
This is the fourth piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2025, METR ran a randomized controlled trial: 16 senior developers, five years of experience on average, did 246 real tasks with AI. Beforehand they expected to be 24% faster; afterward they still felt 20% faster; measured, they were 19% slower. Even the simplest judgment — "did AI make me faster" — got called backwards by the people who knew the work best. When building gets fast and cheap, "can we build it" stops filtering any idea out, and the expensive judgment moves to "should we build it." This piece gives you four things you can actually do: stop using difficulty as a gate, ask what happens if you don't build it, write down what becomes true before you start, and let AI lay out options but never trust "feels right."
Becoming an AI-Era PM 03 | Treat AI as a Colleague, Not a Tool
This is the third piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. Most people use AI like a vending machine: a sentence in, an answer out, and the next conversation starts the explanation over from scratch. The CEO of Relay.app said at an AI product leaders summit, "Stop treating AI as a tool — treat it like a colleague you hired." This piece skips the mindset talk and gives you four things you can actually do: write it a handoff doc, hand it a whole task with the boundaries nailed down, review its output the way you'd review a junior's PR, and write every correction back into the doc — with real example prompts.
Becoming an AI-Era PM 02 | Why Not Knowing How to Code Is an Edge
This is the second piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. A residential real estate broker who can't write code built an AI agent that runs his daily operations using Claude and Zapier; in 2026, 63% of vibe coding's active users aren't developers. On the road from idea to a thing that actually runs, people without a technical background sometimes move faster — engineers first have to shed the instinct to be responsible for every line, and the sentence "this is too hard" is one a non-technical person simply can't say.
Becoming an AI-Era PM 01 | Which PM Tasks AI Took Over, and Which Ones Got More Valuable
This is the first piece in the series Becoming an AI-Era PM. In 2026, plenty of AI PM job descriptions dropped writing PRDs, drawing prototypes, and building dashboards from the hard requirements, and swapped in three work samples instead. The tasks AI can take over are falling out of the hiring requirements, and what's left as the bar is the part only a person can do. This piece lays the took over and got more valuable columns side by side, as the overview for the whole series.