As engineering, product, design, DS, etc. melt into a new kind of role, I was reflecting on what roles might look like in the future. For example, when I look at the Claude Code team I see what I think is five archetypes:
1. Prototyper: comes up with brand new ideas; churns out many ideas, most of which don't ship
2. Builder: quickly turns a prototype/idea into production-grade product/infra
3. Sweeper: cleans up the UI, simplifies the code and system, unships, optimizes performance
4. Grower: takes a product that has been built and iterates on it to improve Product-Market Fit
5. Maintainer: owns a mature system to make it secure, reliable, fast, and efficient as it scales
Many people span across 2 roles, and sometimes 3 roles. I also notice that these roles are not really tied to job function -- eg. across Anthropic, some designers match category 1, some 2, some 3; same for engineers, PM, DS.
A healthy team needs a mix of these, depending on the product:
- A product that is new and pre-PMF needs people that are strong at 1+2+3
- A product that is growing and has found PMF needs 2+3+4 and some 5
- A product that has strong PMF needs 3+4+5 and some 2
Maybe product roles of the future will look more like this, and less like the domain-specific roles of today?
@fabiuix@catalinmpit Pai n-are treaba broski cu datoriile, ci efectiv tine de “digitalizarea” defectuoasă; dar na, voi astia cu pfa-urile stiti mai bine :)
@jnunemaker Ditto; looking to move from hetzner to DO or something else, just because I had some negative experiences with their support on behalf of a couple clients
The productivity of working 1 minute every 30 minutes for 16 hours (i.e. 32 minutes) steering agents is much greater than working 8 hours a day (i.e. 480 minutes)
Ruby is still my default for products with complex business logic. But for a read-heavy geometric API serving a single-purpose mobile client, Cloudflare's infra is the better fit with lower latency and better performance.
Right tool for the workload.
I've cut one of my app’s infrastructure bill from ~$20/month to effectively $0 by rewriting the backend from ruby on rails (+ PostGIS) on a VPS to pure Cloudflare infra
The new stack is just:
- Cloudflare Worker
- R2 for GeoJSON storage
- KV for ETags/cache metadata
- 10-minute cron pulling fresh airspace feeds
The API stayed identical, so the iOS app itself didn’t change.
Today is a hard day. I shared this note with the @linear team today: We’ve made the difficult decision to increase our workforce. This is not a cost-cutting exercise or a reflection of anyone’s performance. We’re simply reimagining every role for the agentic AI era. We’re hiring. We’re sorry about that.
@catalinmpit@AlfredSimon It’s a general symptom of Romania’s economical situation. A grocery run is at a minimum 500 RON nowadays, whereas it was… 250 3-4 years ago? Has nothing to do with spending too much
I don’t usually share things like this, but I think it’s important to be honest.
I’ve been looking for a full-time role since September.
I’m a senior iOS engineer + product designer with 10+ years experience, and I’ve spent that time building and shipping real products (most recently: @ateiq_app, @naturalis_app, @getuppapp).
Despite interviews and ongoing work, I’m now about a month away from needing something stable for my family.
If you know a team that values someone who can both design and build, I’d really appreciate an introduction.
Thank you! ❤️