Who agreed to become a builder?

The topic du jour is how product, design, and engineering are converging into one persona called the builder.

AI collapsed the cost of producing the artifact in every discipline, and it did nothing at all to the cost of knowing whether the artifact is any good.

In the early 90s, the laser printer and two hundred bundled fonts arrived at the same time, and the cost of producing a printed page went to zero. The newsletter, the price sheet, and the sales collateral were handed to whoever sat closest to the printer, and the output looked like a ransom note. What everyone eventually concluded was that the tool had gotten cheap and design was still a discipline.

I love that version of things, but what’s happening now feels more like a bait and switch, where the requirements for each role are changing with no training and no support, on things no discipline ever consented to. Now engineers are sighing, "I guess we need to put on a product hat," and it's wholly unsupported by the companies where they work. It assumes they'll volunteer to devote time to lead features the way I have for a decade, and maybe spend their nights and weekends reading thought leadership the way I wanted to when I first started the role, too.

Everyone I know in tech opted into their function because of an interest, talent, and passion for a skillset, not under coercion and threats of obsolescence. And yet, we see this strange hypothesis playing out, that proximity to a role means you can recreate it at the same quality, like a director who should be able to act, or a nurse who can now also perform surgery.

Here are some recent examples of the flow.

Product becoming engineering

Today, as a product manager, I can indeed generate features in code with AI, but an engineer must still review them. I cannot review theirs. Not "shouldn't," literally cannot. Eleven years of sitting across from engineers gave me the vocabulary and none of the judgment, so I can make the thing, and I can't be the last set of eyes on it. Big tech has been in the news for rolling back on teams pushing code without human review, and the bugs and poor experiences that created.

Product becoming design

I've developed prototypes that, when they hit a designer's hands, become elegant and intuitive in a way my first pass wasn't, and I've watched designers reach for patterns and inspiration I've never even considered.

Engineering becoming product

I heard of a situation where a product manager, pressed for time, under-defined a project and asked an engineering team to figure out an entire feature on their own. The team balked and couldn't really do it.

For years I've worked with engineers who, if they had their druthers, would call it release-blocking until they added exceptions for every security edge case they could think of, and engineers who can't spot an out of place icon twice the size of all the other icons in a straight line, and neither could the AI working on it.

I’m talking about great engineers! They're missing the judgment of a discipline they never specialized in, which is the same thing I'm missing when I look at their code.

Conclusions

The builder model looks like three jobs for one salary, and what you actually get is three jobs done at the level of that person's weakest skillset, and without the collaboration we benefit from today. The savings show up immediately, which is why it reads as a win for a while.

I'm describing the people who are here now. If hiring shifts toward people who want the generalist role, the next cohort self-selects differently and this argument gets weaker every year. I'll watch for that, but I don't think it's arrived yet.

If you wouldn't hire a product manager to do engineering when they've sat across from engineers for 5+ years, the same should hold when the table is turned. If you want people to take on a different function, the honest version is to say so, fund the time and the training, and let them decide, because most people I know in tech would at least consider it and almost none of them will be talked into it sideways.

What I think we'll actually see is that nobody stops it, because the revenue holds. Healthcare already went this way. It's plainly a for-profit venture, the incentives moved off the patient decades ago, and even your doctor is working inside a system that has had the care taken out of it. None of it got rolled back, because the money was fine. Tech is getting more careless every year, and if companies can keep eking out dollars by handing three disciplines to one person, nobody has to answer for more enshittification, it just becomes the new normal.

Who benefits from all of this consolidation is the companies, not the people. And it's not going to stop. Maybe we'll come to new roles, and maybe I'm being a luddite about it, but the change isn't happening because it makes sense for us. It makes cents for them.