Arguably the PM role only exists because SWEs don't want to do PM work, and the industry acquiesced to this because SWEs are in very short supply - if you could hire a layperson (sorry) to take a few hours of non-technical work off a SWE's plate, it is worth it.
In a (hypothetical; not quite there yet) world where SWEs are in surplus, there is no reason to have PMs.
The really eye-popping efficiency gains from LLM coding won't come from doing the coding faster but from consolidating the PM, SWE, and QA/SDET roles under the same person. Then you'll start seeing startup/indie level productivity-per-person inside large organizations. Imagine Google is like 50,000 Pieter Levels.
The concept of a large organization doesn’t even make sense in this model. How do you make decisions? How do you coordinate? What is Google when you have 50,000 individual silos?
Decisions are less costly. When a swe can take 4 days to do what would have cost 6 months, the math of making sure you are doing the right thing before executing goes away.
That has little to do with building code and a lot to do with customers and releases and operations - giant companies don’t just magically demo software to people.
There’s so many layers today that can’t exist if this is the way forward.
In a (hypothetical; not quite there yet) world where SWEs are in surplus, there is no reason to have PMs.
The really eye-popping efficiency gains from LLM coding won't come from doing the coding faster but from consolidating the PM, SWE, and QA/SDET roles under the same person. Then you'll start seeing startup/indie level productivity-per-person inside large organizations. Imagine Google is like 50,000 Pieter Levels.