Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:04:43 · Dan Shipper, Lenny Rachitsky
I consistently get AI generated stuff and there's a difference between an AI generated document that's slop and not. And the slap one is it took them less time to make it than it takes me to read it and they don't stand behind every line. So my expectation is if you send me an AI generated document, I think that's great. And if we talk about it and it's clear you have no idea what's in it, big no-no, not allowed to do that. And I think we have this aversion to AI-generated stuff that will go away because the kind of strategy document that GPT 5.5 can write when it's directed well by someone on my team is way better than them just like dinking and dunking their fingers on the keyboard. [01:05:29] S0: Right. Most people are really bad at writing strategy documents. The bar is low.
01:05:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:05:29] S0: Right. Most people are really bad at writing strategy documents. The bar is low. [01:05:33] S1: Yeah. And same thing with email. Most of my email is written by GPT 5.5 in Codex right now. And I honestly would prefer it to say that it's coming from GPT 5.5 and I may change it to do that. But I had this experience the other day where I had to send an email to one of our investors and I asked Codex to go do it. And Codex knows to ask me and it usually does, but this time it didn't and it just sent the email and I didn't look at it at all and I was like, "Fuck." And so I went to my sent and looked at it and I was like, "Oh, this is exactly what I would've sent." And so it's pretty close to that a lot of the time. It can be a little overformal and there's a couple of things that... It's just when you really think about it, most of your email is kind of... It's kind of wrote. It's kind of prosaic. I definitely want to be the one to think about what it should say, what it should say, but the actual sentences don't matter that much to me usually. Sometimes I do a lot and this is coming from a writer. I care a ton about writing. I think that human writing is incredibly important and I expect we only publish human writing. Well, actually we publish a mix of human and AI writing, but we always label it. Sometimes it's nice to have an AI co-author on certain things. I absolutely think that human writing is important and I think that the reaction or the aversion to AI writing is silly.
01:07:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:07:10] S0: It's such an interesting lens on that because when people think about AI writing, I think about social media and videos and your point is internally, if you're just working on planning and documents and email and things like that, that is much less scary that it's AI written. And to your point, people are already doing this, you almost prefer it a lot of times because people are really bad at doing anyway. [01:07:30] S1: We have this too for external stuff. We publish all these guides and the guides are often agent, they're agent assisted and the agent is a co-author and they're intended to be read both by humans and by agents. And that's because if you're writing a huge informational thing, I mean, you do this all the time. In order to really apply it, the best way to do that is just have your agent ingest it and remember the next time I'm doing pricing to remind me of this guide and we'll go through it together or whatever. It allows you to operationalize the ideas much better and it allows you to go much deeper because agents can read like 10,000 pages in like a second. And so you talk to the human about the story and the stuff that matters and the core ideas and the agent has all the details that it can then apply for you when you need it. [01:08:21] S0: Awesome. Anything else in this category before we get into our final category? [01:08:26] S1: No. [01:08:27] S0: Okay, let's do it. So the final bucket is just who will be successful in this AI future that we are approaching/what should people be working on to be successful in this next year or two?
01:08:40 · Dan Shipper
[01:08:40] S1: I am super, super bullish on PMs. And I know that your audience will probably love that, but my anecdotal case that has convinced me of this is we have this guy internally. His name is Marcus and he runs Spiral, which is our writing app. Marcus is a PM by training. He previously ran Axios' writing product and was a PM and had a big team and it got to tens of millions of revenue in ARR. And he took a year off that job and just got super AI-pilled and just learned how to use cursor basically really well. Now I think he uses Claude Code, but he was extremely cursor pilled for a long time. And I would call him lightly technical, like knows what a database migration is. If he has to look at the code, I think he can understand it, but we never could have hired him to do this job even a year ago, but the coding models have gotten good enough that he can pair the technical knowledge that he does have with his really spiky product sense and sense for writing and sense for users and it's so dangerous. He ships faster than almost anyone on the team and he has such a eye for every single user, every single conversation, like what does it mean and how do we collect it into a story about where we want to go next, and what are the issues we need to fix? And all that kind of stuff. And I think that he feels liberated because he doesn't have to organize a whole team of people to do that. He can just do it. And it's super impressive and it makes me very, very bullish on any PM who gets really AI-pilled.
01:10:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:10:29] S0: Music to my ears, Dan, you're making a lot of very happy listeners here. I've been saying this for a long time too. It's just like the skills you need to build are the things, like the building now is done for you. What do you need to be good at? Figuring out what to build, figuring out if it's great, figuring out what problems to solve. So I love that you're actually seeing this come to fruition. [01:10:48] S1: I really believe it. [01:10:50] S0: This could be the highest rated podcast episode of my whole podcast. Everyone's going to be like- [01:10:50] S1: I love it. [01:10:50] S0: ... hell yeah. [01:10:55] S1: It's going to be okay. SaaS is back, PMs are back. [01:10:58] S0: This is the most contrarian episode I've ever done. Oh my God.
01:10:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dan Shipper
[01:10:58] S0: This is the most contrarian episode I've ever done. Oh my God. [01:11:06] S1: Okay. So the other people that I think are going to be super, super power people, and again, this is because we see this internally, is full stack designers. If you're a designer and you're in these tools all the time, you're so used to, okay, I make this beautiful interaction and the engineer just doesn't want to do it or it doesn't happen the way I think it should happen or there's all this stuff and I see so many designers for us internally or externally where they now feel so empowered to go build stuff because they're like, "I have all these ideas to make things look amazing and these interesting interactions." And that's the exact thing that it's really hard to do with vibe coding because it just all looks the same. So it all looks like Slap and they can make stuff that looks so different and now they can actually build it. And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just making pull requests. They don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they just make pull requests and- ... Need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it. I think that's incredible for the way that companies work, but it's also there's a huge opportunity for those people to become entrepreneurs and start their own thing because they can make stuff now. And I think designers are such creative people, and I think AI is a super tool for anyone like that.