Bret Piatt

Advisor, entrepreneur, investor, and non-profit Board member at @TexasLyceum & @Geekdom; retired host of @CyberTalkRadio.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

Looking to discuss cybersecurity or AI with an expert?

I've blocked off a few slots per month where I'm doing 30 minutes for $30.

Bring your topic or issue and we'll dive right in, if there's a bit to read beforehand, send and I'll make an effort to go through things.

Need an NDA? There's one in the scheduling process, it's optional.

You can click on my profile, and then follow the Calendly link (circled in red on the profile photo in this post).

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@manuginobili @rubenj_sa I might be watching a basketball game, you?

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@mitchellh There's certainly a bell curve happening on software development going from "no AI" to "AI I don't know what an IDE is, is that for my AI?"

In the middle there is, "MTTR ship and fix" to "humans do all the PR reviews".

You'll never notice the good AI use, the bad makes HN.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

I took 1.7 million photos over 6 days to catch this photo of a commercial jet in front of the sun.

The moment it happened, TWO floating prominences were visible, making this not just my best aircraft transit photo, but one of the luckiest of my career! Videos of the transit 👇

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@TheStalwart This is a terrible metric, it is very easy to use tokens, while(1) { prompt, "[string that uses lots of tokens]" }.

Quality KPIs that are measurable in a timely manner is hard, very hard.

For AI usage I personally think about tokens per shipped feature, the lower the better.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

1: Are you building rich content sites with perfect performance scores?

2: I can't, I'm using an AI coding tool.

1: You're using the AI tool or it is using you?

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@zeeg @ThePrimeagen I'm not handwriting code, I am trying to figure out how to be a great senior engineer / dev manager to coach it to write great code rather than going in to fix myself.

I find it is likely slower at times but faster overall as I continue to tweak the ruleset & learn to manage it.

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

I just read a PM's post about automating their workflows with AI, so let me share some takes:

1. You can automate documentation all you want. You'll still spend 3 hours a week explaining it to people who won't read it anyway.

2. The biggest time sink in product management isn't creating artifacts. It's convincing others your idea was actually their idea all along.

3. I've seen PMs automate their entire PRD process. They still spend 80% of their time in meetings where nobody references the PRD.

4. AI can write your user stories in seconds. Getting alignment on those stories will still take 4 meetings, 12 Slack threads, and one awkward hallway conversation.

5. Most PMs spend more time writing angry Slack messages and then deleting them than they spend on actual product strategy. This is the emotional labor nobody talks about.

6. Every PM job description mentions "data-driven decision making." In reality, you spend most of your time cleaning up decisions your predecessor made based on vibes and executive opinions.

7. The irony of AI automation tools for PMs: They optimize the 20% of your job that's already efficient. The other 80% - managing up, sideways, and down - remains stubbornly human.

8. You know what takes the most time? Re-explaining the same strategy to different stakeholders who all think they're hearing it for the first time.

9. I automated my entire data analysis workflow last year. Now I spend that saved time defending the data to people who don't like what it says.

10. The best PMs I know aren't great at creating artifacts. They're great at navigating organizational dysfunction without losing their minds.

11. Here's the pattern I see: Junior PMs obsess over perfecting their templates. Senior PMs obsess over reducing the number of meetings where those templates get ignored.

12. You want to know where PMs really spend time? Writing diplomatic versions of "this is a terrible idea" in 15 different ways until one lands.

13. AI can generate a roadmap in minutes. Getting everyone to stop trying to add their pet feature to it is a quarterly battle.

14. The cruel joke: By the time you've automated your PM workflows, you'll probably be promoted to a role where none of those automations matter anymore.

15. If AI could automate stakeholder alignment, that would be the real revolution. Instead, we're automating the creation of documents that prove alignment never existed.

Product management is 20% building products and 80% managing the humans who make building products complicated.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@jimkaskade It is gone already as of today for at least one person and I get the feeling I'm not alone.

https://t.co/zvftgbAE7o

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

So many decisions in April that made the product worse with no version pinning or ability to avoid the regression releases. Bye @claudeai, if you ever return to your March 2026 self maybe we can be together again.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@gabor I read it all the time, am I doing something wrong?

I spend more time reading planning docs than I do code but I'm reading code every day I build.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@tastybits @claudeai Trying Codex with gpt-5.5 on high first. Haven't used GPT deeply since 2025, Claude was crushing it in my workflow style.

So far Codex feels like February Claude before all of the hiding of the work, unsure about the pace, will take a few days to see productivity.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

So many decisions in April that made the product worse with no version pinning or ability to avoid the regression releases. Bye @claudeai, if you ever return to your March 2026 self maybe we can be together again.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@Austen It is a 1+1=3 situation right now, will be interested to see how long that's the case.

Product managers can build MVPs now but if you want a long term architecture you still need an engineer driving the architecture.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@jmitch Look.. Opus 4.7.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@hnshah

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@_robyn_smith @LukeParkerDev How about 60?
https://t.co/oVb5Gz0wSh

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

That's a team! #GoSpursGo

[San Antonio Spurs @spurs]

This team 🥹🖤

Squad pulled up in KJ fashion to celebrate our Sixth Man 🤠

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@tastybits @OpenAI I'm not using @OpenAI directly for anything paid & I'm not aware of any clients doing so, unsure how OpenAI gets paid by Microsoft. I'm seeing a lot of Copilot usage, incumbency is magical.

Seems like OpenAI needs to figure out B2C revenue model ASAP while they have the users.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@signulll I use Gemini Pro for audits, reviews of development plans, and red teaming solutions to problems.

For writing greenfield code, or even doing full bug fixes, I've struggled to figure out how to make it successful.

[Bret Piatt @bpiatt]

@bindureddy Anthropic rolled me back to Opus 4.6 today. I didn't do anything differently, launched shells, typed in 'claude', fixed some things, saw commit message signed 'Opus 4.6'.

Ouch.

[Adib Hanna @adibhanna]

Had an interview with a “crypto” recruiter. We talked for about 40 minutes, and then they asked me to look at some code.

Their first instruction was to clone the repo. I didn’t. They seemed surprised, so I told them I wanted a moment to check whether it was safe first.

I ran a quick analysis with Claude.

Turns out the code had a backdoor. It would copy my environment variables and send them to a remote server.

The recruiter went speechless and ended the call pretty quickly.

Be careful who you talk to. Scammers are real.