---
title: "We are all product engineers now"
description: "Laurie Voss argues that cheaper software will move engineering toward product judgment without shrinking the industry, because lower costs will create much more demand."
author: "Pau Friedman"
kind: "link"
published_at: "2026-09-15"
url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/15/we-are-all-product-engineers-now"
markdown_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/15/we-are-all-product-engineers-now.md"
canonical_url: "https://pau.fm/blog/2026/09/15/we-are-all-product-engineers-now"
external_url: "https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/"
---

# [We are all product engineers now](<https://seldo.com/posts/we-are-all-product-engineers-now/>)

Laurie Voss supplies the more bullish half of today’s argument:

> The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is
> following.

I’m more bullish than [Kruer](/blog/2026/09/15/why-im-still-bearish-on-llms-after-navier-stokes)
about much of engineering. A lot of it is “just wait for the tooling”: deploys, operations, and
maintenance are not obviously structural limits on model capability. Product judgment is different:
someone still has to decide what is worth making and what “good” means.

Then Jevons does his usual trick. Make software radically cheaper and we will demand radically more
of it: the bad dentist website, the school spreadsheet, the government process held together by
email. The job moves toward product engineering, but the industry’s aggregate shape may change less
than expected—plenty of well-paid people making far more software, while spending much less time
typing it.