2026-07-14
A Day as an AI-Era PM: How I Turned One Sentence Into a Prototype You Can Actually Tap
One afternoon last week, I turned 'I want a little thing that tracks what I spend' into a prototype my coworker could actually tap on his phone — record a real expense, see a real pie chart. Not a single line of code. Everyone thinks the AI era means PMs have to go learn programming. It's actually the reverse: the skill that's worth money now is getting your words clear enough that AI gets it right on the first try. This isn't a lecture — it's exactly how I did it: how to make AI interrogate me first, how to change only one thing at a time, why the very first version should run on real data, and how to use 'can you tap through it?' as your acceptance line. Includes the potholes I stepped in.
