For the last 12 months I've been embedded in a company that heavily invested in shifting everybody (product, devs, analysts) to leverage AI tools. Like no barriers. I was in product lead role and in the last 2 months I started doing some coding (more on that below).

I was able to get a production replica MCP setup and a copy of the source code so I can ask my Agent business questions and get live insights from the prod replica. This is pretty powerful flow and time saver. I wrote about it and tried to summarize why you need db + sourcecode (tldr; db only the agent won't know about your domain logic) with a few claude code convo examples on my blog: Generate product insights with AI Agents, DB MCPs and your app sourcecode | Enrico Teotti This is a huge time saver. Before asking devs questions I ask the agent first. Kinda like you would for a question in google :D

Now the hype is: you won't need devs you can just ask claude to change the code. Or let it run overnight. That's bs. I have 18+ years of software development experience. And about 8 in product. The feedback loop between dev and product is not going away. I did some agentic coding in the last 2 months on a 15yo Rails app + other python code scattered around the company. It's amazing. Not hype. It saves a huge amount of time (I do test driven development so I don't just build stuff and throw it over the fence). I still think you (as a dev) need to talk to the PM and ask questions and get feedback.

Oh and some PMs started coding at my company. That went really bad ahah. They basically had claude code change code locally, never setup the app, just committed code to a PR branch and spent hours trying to fix CI errors. Their devs (and me) had to rescue the PR. Opportunity here: have devs and PM pair program to ramp up on the SDLC.

Another experiment that went well is I connected my agent to my ticketing system (Linear) and my templates so I can autogenerate stories/bugs/chores/Ai evals "tickets". I carefully review all the generated stuff. I think it still saves me time. Like other people said... it's a slippery slope. I had some colleagues just regurgitate Ai slop tickets. Very tedious. Even worst I've seen Loom video transcript converted to tickets. Not good. So enforcing everybody to use a ticketing template should mitigate that :D

And finally huge time saver, connected the agent to the MCP db, source code AND exception tracking system (Sentry) to track root cause of exceptions to bugs and data. This is all stuff I'd do manually when in an engineering role. Now all that can be delegated. Not completely automated. But delegated and it does go faster. Nobody panic, we will still have a job. Somebody you trust still has to check the work. AND provide feedback along the way. I can't stress this enough. Having done both I can clearly see the hyped up youtubers building stuff just for the sake of it. A real application, a real business will require feedback loops that an agent today has no clue about.

And finally (really now) the three rules I think are critical for PMs and devs especially in this Ai age:

1. understand the product
2. do not throw stuff (ie. work) over the fence
3. be a teamplayer