Marc Andreessen: "There's Mexican standoff between roles on a software team"

AI coding tools like Claude Code are blurring roles on software teams. As Marc Andreessen said on Lenny's podcast: " There's a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles: product manager, designer, and coder."

Links referenced in this episode:
→ Mark Andreessen on Lenny's Podcast
→ "The Five Stages of Losing Our Craft"
→ Kent Beck's tweet on 90% of skills becoming irrelevant
→ Good vibes, bad vendors

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Marc Andreessen: 00:00

The way I've been describing this is there's like a Mexican standoff happening between those three roles, between product manager, designer, and and coder. You know the concept of the Mexican standoff, right, which is the the movie scene where you've got, like, a triangle. They've got, you know, guns in both hands. Each is aiming at the other two. And you've got this kind of standoff situation.

Marc Andreessen: 00:17

So every coder now believes they can also be a product manager and a designer, right? Because they have AI. Every product manager thinks they can be a coder and a designer. And then every designer knows they can be a product manager and a coder, right? And so people in each of those roles now know or believe that with AI, they don't need the other two roles anymore, right?

Marc Andreessen: 00:36

They're actually all kind of correct, I think, right? Which is AI is actually a pretty good, you know, it's actually now a really good coder. It's actually now a really good designer and it's also a really good product manager. Right? It's actually good at doing all three of those things or at least doing a lot of the tasks involved in in in those three jobs.

Justin Jackson: 00:50

I can't get that concept, that picture out of my head ever since on Lenny's podcast, he interviewed Marc Andreessen. This idea of the Mexican standoff between roles on a software team. AI is really disrupting what each role thinks they should be doing. Software devs, designers, product people, but also sales people, customer success, CEOs, founders, everybody's recalibrating. And one thing that worries me is they seem to be recalibrating around this sentiment that Kent Beck expressed, which is:

Justin Jackson (quoting Kent Beck): 01:36

"I've been reluctant to try AI. But today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. But the leverage of my remaining 10% went up a thousand. I need to recalibrate."

Justin Jackson: 01:57

This kind of rationalization makes sense when we've watched how decades of our expertise and experience have been theoretically replaced by by AI and LLMs and Claude code. But my worry is that now everybody is going to be going after this mythical 10% where all the leverage is, and it might get crowded.

Justin Jackson: 02:22

For example, in this widely shared article, The Five Stages of Losing our Craft, there's a section where he mentions the Kent Beck quote, and then goes on to say:

Justin Jackson (quoting Andrew Murphy): 02:35

"The engineers who are doing well right now stopped identifying primarily as people who write code. They started identifying as people who solve problems and provide value to users. Code is one of the tools they use to do that. They got comfortable directing the work instead of doing the work."

Justin Jackson: 02:53

I think that's a great aspiration. But again, in this Mexican standoff between roles on a software team, isn't every role going to be trying to do this? Solve problems, provide value to users? In the short term, I think this is going to be incredibly disruptive to teams as this kind of jockeying for place happens.

Justin Jackson: 03:14

But I am hopeful that we're going to settle into something that might be just a really beautiful new way for people on a team to work, interact, and collaborate together.

Justin Jackson: 03:28

For example, here's something I thought of, which is maybe product people and designers and engineers could form these small two person teams where they're essentially pair programming using tools like Claude Code together. Where the product manager, for example, maybe is coming to the table with a clear sense of what the user wants, why they want it, what kind of experience we need to deliver to the user. And with the engineer working side by side, they can drive the AI to produce software that really gets at what the user wants, but is also reliable and secure and safe and performant. And together as a two person team, maybe they can achieve far more than a 10 person team or a 20 person team.

Justin Jackson: 04:25

In fact, 37signals, the company who makes Basecamp, essentially works like this today. They have two person teams who work on features together. In their case, it's a designer and an engineer.

Justin Jackson: 04:36

But there's no reason it couldn't be cross functional individuals coming together to build really great software together, using and leveraging their individual skills, expertise, lived experience, but partnering together, and then amplifying their efforts with AI tools. That could be a really beautiful way to build software in the future.