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Product Management: AI Skepticism Rises

Thu, Jan 22, 2026

Today's product landscape is seeing a critical examination of AI's role, alongside advancements in developer tools, accessibility-focused design, and marketplace monetization strategies.

  • Growing skepticism towards current AI models like ChatGPT, with increasing emphasis on the need for world models and neurosymbolic AI. 1 2
  • Focusing on pragmatic system design over designing for imaginary scale to avoid overbuilt software architectures and unnecessary costs in early product stages. 3
  • The shift towards proactive AI coding assistants exemplified by Google's Jules, which can now surface tasks and respond to events independently, marking a change in how developers interact with AI. 4
  • Addressing developer concerns regarding the trustworthiness of plugins with new tools designed to automate health checks and dependency vetting, increasing confidence in third-party components. 5
  • AI's impact on the engineering profession, prompting a reassessment of roles and the need for critical thinking in an age of AI-generated content. 6 7
  • Free, open-source fonts like Hyperlegible Sans improving accessibility by addressing legibility challenges such as glyph blurring and character distinction in low-vision contexts. 8
  • The importance of specific and concrete communication in leadership, replacing vague terms like "ASAP" with clear timelines and prioritized sequences to avoid miscommunication and anxiety. 9
  • Integrating brand styles, real data, and pattern reuse from the beginning in UI generation to create more valuable and usable AI-generated UI designs, moving beyond just demos. 10
  • Marketplace monetization strategies are being re-evaluated, with focus on optimizing lifetime value, understanding power dynamics, frequency, ticket size, and value delivered to avoid pushing a "rake too far" which can backfire. 11
These developments signal a crucial turning point for product management. The need for critical evaluation of AI technologies, a focus on practical and accessible design, and strategic approaches to marketplace monetization highlight the evolving priorities and challenges facing product teams today. Navigating this landscape requires a blend of technical understanding, user-centric thinking, and strategic vision.

Quick hits

  • Upcoming product management conferences in 2026 offering networking and learning opportunities. 12
  • Understanding how ChatGPT and other large language models work, from tokenization to output generation. 13
  • Discussion on the potential for AI to generate misinformation and the importance of correcting it. 14
  • The architecture of AWS S3, including its massive scale, strong consistency, and use of Rust for performance-critical code. 15

Further reading

Breaking: Sir Demis Hassabis becomes the latest to say that ChatGPT is a dead-end and that we must turn our focus to world models
1

Breaking: Sir Demis Hassabis becomes the latest to say that ChatGPT is a dead-end and that we must turn our focus to world models

Jan 22, 2026•Marcus on AI

Per the Times of India: For more about world models and how some of us have thought about them over the years, see this earlier essay: And see also my 2020, Next Decade in AI for an older but still very relevant perspective on how limits in stat...

How Does ChatGPT Work? A Guide for the Rest of Us
2

How Does ChatGPT Work? A Guide for the Rest of Us

Jan 21, 2026•Product Talk

Audio Version ($) Everybody is buzzing about generative AI and there's a lot of jargon that comes along with it: tokens, embeddings, attention, neural networks, transformers. Whether we are talking about ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, the large lan...

3

Scale Is Not a Goal: Why Most Software Architectures Are Overbuilt

Jan 22, 2026•Hackernoon

Designing for imaginary scale leads to real costs. Why pragmatic systems beat “future-proof” architectures in early products. Read All

4

Google's Jules Starts Surfacing Work on Its Own, Signaling a Shift in AI Coding Assistants

Jan 22, 2026•Hackernoon

Google is make its Jules coding agent more "proactive," allowing it to surface tasks and respond to events without being explicitly invoked by developers. Read All

5

Why 70% of Developers Don’t Trust Plugins—and How I Built a Fix

Jan 22, 2026•Hackernoon

Do you suffer from 'Dependency Anxiety'? 60% of Laravel developers spend up to 30 minutes just vetting a single package. Learn how I built Laraplugins.io—a high-performance tool running on Laravel Octane and FrankenPHP—to automate health checks an...

6

‘Are We Cooked?’ AI Forces a Rethink of What It Means to Be an Engineer

Jan 22, 2026•Hackernoon

As AI coding agents evolve, they are not just assisting but proactively shaping software development, prompting crucial reflections on future roles.Read All

Is AI slop training us to be better critical thinkers?
7

Is AI slop training us to be better critical thinkers?

Jan 21, 2026•UX Collective

The rise of the skeptical user in an age of synthetic media Illustration by Gemma SmithI’ve been following the discourse around AI-generated content closely. My original hypothesis for social media was simple: IF algorithms shepherd us toward com...

Hyperlegible Sans: a free, open-source font for accessible design
8

Hyperlegible Sans: a free, open-source font for accessible design

Jan 21, 2026•UX Collective

An accessibility-focused evolution of Inter that blends modern geometry with hyperlegible design principles. Hyperlegible Sans, a free, open-source typeface designed as an accessibility-focused evolution of Inter. Version 1.0 includes Regular, Me...

Avoid “ASAP” and other high-strung, non-specific words
9

Avoid “ASAP” and other high-strung, non-specific words

Jan 21, 2026•Wes Kao

👋 Hey, it’s Wes. Welcome to my bi-weekly newsletter on managing up, leading teams, and standing out as a high performer. For more, check out my intensive course on Executive Communication & Influence for Senior ICs and Managers. NOTE: The upcomin...

What makes generated UI worth keeping?
10

What makes generated UI worth keeping?

Jan 21, 2026•UX Collective

How brand, data, and reuse help ideas move past the demo phase Music platform screens vibe coded with various AI tools like Anima and UizardAs designers, we know there are many tools at our disposal to create AI-generated UI, like Lovable, Anima,...

11

How Much Do Marketplaces Really Take?

Jan 21, 2026•Growth Unhinged

In this episode of Mostly Growth, CJ Gustafson and Kyle Poyar unpack how marketplaces really make money by dissecting take rates across companies like Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Etsy, and Amazon. They explore what drives take rates—power dynamics, fr...

Your Guide to PM Conferences in 2026
12

Your Guide to PM Conferences in 2026

Jan 21, 2026•Aakash G Product Growth

Everyone keeps asking me: what are the PM conferences you recommend going to? Well, there’s nothing perfect. So I’m putting one on for you! It’s tomorrow morning and free: Join Us I’ll be giving a talk on “Stop using AI in the browser.” You’ll ...

What if AI lies about you?
13

What if AI lies about you?

Jan 21, 2026•UX Collective

We know AI gets it wrong. How do we correct misinformation before it spreads? Continue reading on UX Collective »

How AWS S3 is built
14

How AWS S3 is built

Jan 21, 2026•Pragmatic Engineer

Stream the latest episode Listen and watch now on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. See the episode transcript at the top of this page, and timestamps for the episode at the bottom. Brought to You by • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, ana...

15

The Four Horsemen of Churn: Here's How to Stop Your Subscribers From Leaving

Jan 21, 2026•Hackernoon

There are 4 core types of churn. To help your business grow, you need to fight them in different ways. Churn can be reduced from 25% to 10% by focusing on the below problems.Read All