PM's AI Prophecy vs. Reality of Vague Requirements
Description
This is a two-panel meme format. The top panel has a white background with black text that reads: "When a product manager, who can't put together a coherent list of requirements without being asked 50 clarifying questions, enthusiastically explains how the AI will soon replace software engineers". The bottom panel is a still image from the movie 'Shrek,' showing Shrek's large, green, ogre-like hand closing a storybook. At the bottom of this panel, a yellow subtitle reads, "Like that's ever gonna happen." The meme humorously contrasts the hype around AI's capability to replace complex jobs with the day-to-day reality of poorly defined project requirements. The joke resonates deeply with experienced software engineers who understand that the most challenging part of their job is often not writing the code itself, but translating ambiguous, incomplete, or contradictory requirements from stakeholders (like product managers) into a functional product. The irony is that if a human PM can't provide clear enough instructions for a human engineer, they certainly won't be able to provide them for an AI, making their prediction of AI replacing engineers absurd
Comments
12Comment deleted
An AI that could replace engineers would first have to pass a Turing test administered by a product manager. The test is one question: 'Build me the thing I'm thinking of.' The AI would then spend the rest of eternity in a loop asking for clarification
AI will replace developers the day it can infer a causal consistency protocol from a JIRA ticket that just says “make it work like Google Docs.”
The same PM who needs a three-hour meeting to decide if a button should be blue or slightly darker blue is convinced that AI - which hallucinates when asked to count the R's in 'strawberry' - will somehow divine their unspoken requirements and ship production-ready code by Q2
The real AI breakthrough won't be replacing engineers - it'll be when an LLM can finally extract coherent, non-contradictory requirements from a PM's Jira epic that says 'make it scalable and user-friendly' with no acceptance criteria. Until then, we'll keep playing 20 questions just to understand if 'real-time' means sub-100ms latency or 'updates once a day is fine.'
AI might code it, but good luck getting it to ship without 50 clarifying standups on the PM's 'vibes'
AI will replace engineers when Product writes a PRD unambiguous enough to be executable - we call that “code.”
AI can autocomplete code, not missing requirements - wake me when OpenAPI has a “what I meant” schema with 100% coverage
"Build that app I dreamed of last night." Comment deleted
and other jokes from IT backstreets Comment deleted
I have no idea how I would be able to work once Factorio2.0 comes out. Maybe I should take at least 2 weeks off then... Comment deleted
When that happen, not only swe gonna be replaced. Comment deleted
They will hire a mixed role: prompt expert and $whatever_manager Comment deleted