More AI, Less Product Thinking

These days, I always find myself thinking of those old days. Before ChatGPT, people came up with ideas. I know they had spent weeks or even months creating a draft of their prototype. Now, abruptly, they come with documents. Of course, it is impressive for a client to appear prepared. Still, they just appear to be. I accept it is fast and practical to use an AI tool to generate business models, architectures, roadmaps and even tech stacks. It is crystal clear that possessing that generated information does not mean understanding it.

GenAI is a great tool to jump over all barriers to planning, architecture and creating feature lists. The trap is that there is now something forgotten, the quality of thinking.

Now, in the meetings and even before the meetings, I receive AI-gen PDFs. I talk to clients reading AI-gen content in meetings. So, it is challenging to have discussions today.

Why? Because AI says, “Yes, it can be done.”, “Yes, that is possible.”, “Yes, you can integrate it.”. I know it is, but have you ever thought about when, why, how much, how long, etc.?

Well, I mean, it is not that AI is bad. It is that, before, people were outsourcing to professionals, today, too often, I see they are outsourcing critical thinking, reasoning and decision making…

This feeling might come from my educational background. Because I am dealing with curriculum and instruction academically, I feel overwhelmed sometimes. I believe the best projects to work on are those built by people who ask better questions.