WGMaTW: The Adolescence of AI, RIP IDEs, and the End of FAANG’s Decade
What Got My Attention This Week, as a Product Leader
Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.
1/ The Adolescence of Technology
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, and former research leader at Open AI and Google Brain, shared an essay that reads less like societal speculation and more like a warning label.
“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
Amodei’s core idea is pretty simple, and a little unsettling. Whether we like it or not, we’re racing toward a form of ‘powerful AI’ that looks less like a tool and more like ‘a country of geniuses in a datacenter.’
He writes about surveillance, propaganda, identity, economic shocks, and power concentration.
The upside could be extraordinary. The downside isn’t inevitable, but it is civilizational in scale. Unlike the emergence of the web (or web 2.0… and web 3), AI feels different: We may be moving faster than any of our institutions—governments, companies, norms—can realistically adapt.
He doesn’t argue for panic or doomerism, but he does warn against denial, complacency, and the false comfort of ‘we’ll figure it out later.’
Now, what really caught my attention is how consistent this framing has become across all AI leaders. From Elon Musk to Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang, they’re all saying some version of the exact same thing: AI is both the threat, and the solution.
On one hand, that’s obviously self-serving.
On the other, they genuinely seem uneasy and even puzzled at times about what their combined efforts are unleashing.
Some of you might be wondering what any of this has to do with product. I have way more thoughts there than fit in this week, but this quote is the one that stuck with me:
“AI will be capable of a very wide range of human cognitive abilities—perhaps all of them.”
If that’s even directionally true, and we’re heading to a world where AI does most of the coding (and a lot of the ‘thinking’)… then software as we know it is in its awkward teenage phase.
Coding gets cheap. Teams shrink. Learning cycles compress to something we’ve never seen before. The advantage shifts from ‘who can build’ to ‘who can decide well.’ Orchestrators over implementers. Taste over labor.
More speed, leverage, and impact per person than ever.
But there’s a real flip side. If models can handle end-to-end software engineering and large portions of white-collar work, we don’t just get productivity gains — we get a massive surplus of labor. That pressure shows up everywhere: Wages, roles, expectations, org design, culture, investment math. And power concentrates quickly in the hands of the companies best positioned to deploy and control these systems.
I’m not convinced AI is our greatest threat.
I’m not convinced it’s the solution either.
But one thing is undeniable at this point: Ignoring it is no longer an option.
2/ Where does the IDE go from here?
This AI Engineer Code Summit talk by Steve Yegge & Gene Kim echoes some of the same arguments as Dario’s essay — in terms of how quickly AI’s advances are reshaping software development. Vibe coding is making the process of building and shipping increasingly faster, more ambitious, and arguably more fun.
Ironically, Steve emphasized that he loves Claude Code and uses it 12 hours a day, but he also claims it’s ‘not it.’
“Claude Code is like a drill or a saw. How much damage can an untrained person do with a drill or a saw? How much damage can you do as an untrained Engineer with Claude Code? It’s very similar. You can cut your foot off. But you can also be really really skilled with it, and do very precise work — like a craftsman.”
Claude Code, Replit, Cursor and Codex are among many tools actively rethinking software engineering. Steve predicts that within the next year, AI will be able to write nearly all the code—and that the primary interface will be a UI, not a command line, and not an IDE.
Now, the IDE probably won’t just die or disappear. But there’s a compelling case that it might just dissolve into the model. Regardless of timing, a real shift is brewing here—and to Amodei’s point, complacency isn’t advised.
“This is a lot like what happened with the Swiss mechanical watch industry…”
3/ From a decade of FAANG to a decade of AI
Alex Turnbull, CEO of Groove, a company behind multiple AI-powered tools including Helply and InstantDocs, posted a note on LinkedIn about compensation levels at FAANG vs AI leading companies.
“The engineers who want to build the future are going to the companies building it. The ones who want stability are staying at FAANG. Both are valid choices. FAANG had its decade and this is AI’s decade now.”
The framing isn’t perfect—FAANG no longer needs to pay the same premiums, and Alphabet in particular is clearly positioning itself as an AI leader. Still, the takeaway is hard to ignore, and especially timely… even if it’s a little uncomfortable.
Bonus: Lovable Downgrade Masterclass
If you’ve read this newsletter you probably know I’m a fan of Lovable — as a product, brand, user experience, and team.
That’s why I had to fully agree with Yaakov Carno, founder of PLG agency Valubyl, when he recently wrote on LinkedIn about their approach to the downgrade flow:
“Whatever happens with these monetization experiments, one thing is clear: This is a company that’s obsessed over what their users want and need, and it shows in every part of their product.”
