The Great AI Fumbling

... and why it's the best you can do!

I Was on the HMZE Podcasts 50th episode. Here Are the Raw Theses.

Sebastian Heide Meier zu Erpen and André Neubauer had me on their podcast. HMZE Beyond Vibecoding, episode fifty. Anniversary time, hat an honour to be the gust! We - of course - talked about AI, product development, and strategy. Went deeper than I expected.

A few things slipped out that made even me pause. Here’s the extract. Unfiltered.

TLDR

AI isn’t just changing how code gets written. It’s changing how decisions flow, which roles still make sense, and how close leadership needs to be to reality. Most companies are currently running the assembly line with the wrong model on it. And the line is running.

(Use English subtitles if necessary)

The Top Theses

1. Claude Code is the worst product name of all time

2. McKinsey reports are no better than an AI analysis fed with random documents

3. Middle management is about to become the real bottleneck — and the actual death blow

4. Two-week sprints don’t make sense anymore

5. 90 % of your skills became worthless — overnight

6. Strategy is becoming more important, not less

7. The information content of your strategy documents is so low that your wording debates are irrelevant

8. Decisions need to land in the infrastructure files today. Not once a quarter.
   

What’s Behind It

1. Claude Code is not for code.

Probably the worst product name ever. You read “Code” and think: not for me, I’m not a developer, next. And in doing so, every product person, strategist, COO, and CEO is missing the most powerful tool they could have right now.

I use it every day. Zero lines of code. I analyze user interviews. I build agents that check back-briefings against strategic briefings. I draw conclusions from Slack channels, Git commits, strategy docs. I filter out in real time where things are going sideways in the company. Every morning.

The trick compared to regular chat: your context is always there. You set it up once — who’s the company, what’s the market, what strategy are we pursuing — and it sticks. Every conversation. Every agent run. Once you’ve worked this way, regular chat is almost unbearable. Having to re-explain everything from scratch every time. Intolerable.

Björn Schotte gave me the decisive push: Forget the Lovable and Bolt toys. If you’re serious, go straight to Claude Code or Cursor. Because then your deliverables are right next to the developer. In Markdown. Directly pushable to Jira or Linear or wherever the hell you need them. That’s the actual point.

2. McKinsey reports are no better than an AI analysis.

Sounds provocative. I mean it. (And yes, I know they’re selling social safety, not actually great reports ;)

I throw in random documents. From all levels. Strategy slides. Back-briefings from middle management. Slack messages. Git commit metadata with descriptions of what they’re supposed to support. No clean set. No curated dossier. Just the stuff that’s there. And then I ask: What does this company actually want? What is it actually doing right now?

What comes out is so to the point that I have a communication problem. Not a quality problem. People get defensive immediately. “That’s not what we meant.” “But we were trying to.” “That’s not fair.” All true. Nobody intentionally did anything wrong. The analysis doesn’t say that either. It just says: You want this. You’re doing that. There’s a delta. We should talk about it.

The terrifying part: Zero politics. Zero deference to hierarchy. Zero agenda. Just what’s in there. Incorruptible. I’ve seen a lot of McKinsey bullshit in my life. The hordes come in, you’re four million poorer, they’re there for a quarter, they come back with a report — and I swear it’s no better than what a “random analysis” produces. Sometimes worse. Because it’s softer. Because it’s more political.

The biggest problem isn’t the quality of the analysis. It’s: How the hell do you communicate this to humans? When something is so much to the point, the normal human reaction is “duck for cover” first, no matter how smart people are. I’m working on that part. But the raw material is brutal.

3. Middle management: The death blow.

The CEOs /COOs currently hunched over their layoff spreadsheets are thinking about it backwards. They’re looking at: Where do I cut production costs? Who’s expendable? And they’re completely missing what the next bottleneck will be.

When your developers are so empowered that you can build 20 variants of five features a day — what slows you down then? Not the tech. The sluggish process around it. The committee that meets once a quarter. The absurd decisions that get painstakingly poured into presentations. Some assistant, some COO office rolling it out across the company over the next three months. And at the end, a fraction of it arrives as a Markdown file on the developer’s desk. Those are two systems that have nothing to do with each other anymore.

Picture VW. The assembly line is running — with the wrong model on it. Because the decision to retool is stuck somewhere on the third floor. It’s been decided, it’s been engineered, it’s sitting right there — but nobody’s retooling. Tough luck. Wrong car produced. That’s exactly what’s happening right now in every company that’s building speed on the development side without touching the decision architecture.

Bitter pill, especially for middle management: When your production speed dictates the pace, it doesn’t matter how useful the intermediate layers are — they’re slowing things down. You need systems so direct that decisions don’t trickle through five levels and create drift five times over. Very few layers. Or hyper-efficient ones supported by AI.

The jobs that existed aren’t as useful as they were. That’s not a judgment. That’s physics.

4. Two-week sprints: Goodbye.

Back to basics. The core principle from the original paper “The New New Product Development Game” — the ur-text that all Scrum people reference — was overlapping phases. Not sequential. Simultaneous. That was the dream.

What the sprint did: pack that ideal into a two-week container so reality could cope. Teams needed to sync. Stakeholders needed rhythm. Reviews needed planning. The sprint was a compromise with slowness. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now you have perfect overlap. Design in the morning, build at noon, review in the afternoon, ship in the evening. Not as a metaphor. Literally. What’s a two-week sprint supposed to do there? Probably even a daily sprint doesn’t make sense. You probably have a morning shift and an evening shift. Or just complete flow. Which was always the dream anyway.

And when work moves that fast — the problem of keeping oversight multiplies. Without end. That’s why you need the daily check: Is what’s being built right now going in the direction of the markers? Not once per sprint. Every day.

5. 90 % of your skills: Worthless. Overnight.

Kent Beck wrote this two or three years ago. 90 % of his skills lost their value from one day to the next. The remaining 10 % multiplied a thousandfold. That was bold back then. Today reality is staring you in the face with it.

Look at the specializations that emerged over the last 15 years. Product Marketing Manager. Product Owner. UX Researcher. Frontend Specialist. Backend Specialist. The list is absurdly long. All of it was an answer to complexity. If one person can’t know everything, then at least one person per thing. Sounds reasonable. It was. It isn’t anymore.

These specialized skills almost all fall into the 90 % zone. You can get the stuff done. Not perfectly. But good enough for the next step. And “good enough for the next step” in a system that improves every day eventually becomes “better than the specialist.” This isn’t future tense. It’s happening now.

What’s in the 10 %: Setting direction. Holding context. Noticing when the system is running wrong even though it’s running fast. Tolerating ambiguity. The human stuff. Figuring out your own 10 % — nobody can do that for you. But I wouldn’t wait forever.

6. Strategy: Now more than ever.

You might think: If everything’s so easy now, I’ll just do everything. 20 features a day. 100 variants. Why bother with strategy? Let it roll let the good times come..

That’s exactly when you need clear markers. Who are you? What don’t you do? James Bond doesn’t do just anything. James Bond does James Bond things. Coca-Cola does Coca-Cola things. eBay took years to explain to customers that you could now also buy directly. Not because the tech was hard. Because the identity shift was horror. Customers came for auctions. “Buy now? What? That’s practically fraud.” It took forever. Then classifieds got added. Another 5 years of explaining. Changing identity isn’t “oh, let’s just add that too.”

And the Elon Musk stuff everyone celebrates? Expensive car first, then mass market. That’s not genius. That’s the playbook for entering an expensive market that requires heavy investment. Of course you don’t start with the cheap car. How would that work? It doesn’t throw off enough for R&D. You can’t do it any other way. It’s a strategic pattern, not brilliance. 20 years later, if it works, everyone writes: Obviously, the guy’s smart. Nope. Standard playbook with good execution.

Marker-Options-Work resolves exactly this tension. Markers are identity — slow. Options are the ways to express that identity — medium speed. Work realizes the options — fast. The three layers must be coherent. Always. And the faster the work gets, the more often you need to check whether the coherence still holds. Not less often. More often.

Pace Layering explains it best: Fashion can push 200 collections a year because commerce, infrastructure, and politics underneath are stable. Zara doesn’t think about trade law. Doesn’t have to. It’s just there. You can only be fast at the edge — customer-facing — if you’re brutally stable on the inside. That’s the tension. And whoever can’t hold it flies apart.

7. Your wording debates are bullshit.

This epiphany hurt the most. Myself. My own vanity.

I throw strategy documents into the AI. The good version. The bad one. The latest draft. The one before. And then I ask: What does this company want? What is it doing right now? The answer: Exactly the same. Every time. Regardless of the wording.

The information content of these documents is so low that it makes zero difference whether you take the polished version or the first rough draft. Debated for months. Went over the phrasing one more time over red wine the night before. The final review meeting on Sunday before the offsite. All of it irrelevant. Zero difference. The direction is the information. Not the sentence.

And the humble insight behind it: The team feels better because they found this great wording. Maybe the drift goes one way, maybe the other. But operationally it makes zero difference. All those final polishing loops — irrelevant. Let that sink in.

Strategy isn’t unimportant. The energy is just completely in the wrong place. On phrasing instead of direction. On the paper instead of what happens after. And the strategist says: “I’m the artist here. I know how to maneuver people into position. We obviously need another two-day offsite.” No. You don’t. What you need is daily exchange between the layers. That’s the real work. The rest is theater.

8. Decisions into the infra files. Today. Not next month.

The most concrete thing from the conversation. And probably the most radical.

If you decide something today, it’s in the context documents for your agents and developers today. Not next month. Not after the next quarterly. Today. The machine is running. It needs the information to build the right thing. If it doesn’t have the information, it builds the wrong thing. Fast. A lot of it. Wrong. That’s VW with the wrong model on the line. Except the line runs ten times faster now.

I meet daily with the companies I work with. Mornings. Brief. Listen: What happened? Where is something going in the wrong direction? Where do we need a decision? And then not: Build a deck, prep the quarterly, roll it out. Instead: Straight into the infrastructure. Into the system prompts. Into the context docs. Into the dev environment. Today.

Sounds exhausting? It is. For humans. For systems, speed is irrelevant. And the COO I’m supporting with these experiments is absurdly faster — because he’s not waiting for some quarterly update to make its way through three layers. He sees what’s happening. Daily. He acts. Daily.

The side effect: Founders and CEOs report getting a completely different sense of control back. For years most of them built an increasingly indirect company. Another 20 developers. Another ten layers of middle management. Another structure, another one. Everything they did was buy a company they could steer less and less. And it annoyed most of them, if they’re being honest. Now they suddenly see again: I can steer directly. How great is that? Founder mode back. The problem is just that a few people need to be reshuffled. Because the jobs they had aren’t that useful anymore.

To Close with the beginning

We’re all fumbling around. That was the first sentence in the episode. Still true. Nobody knows what the organization looks like in three years. Same as during the internet revolution. Same as with mobile. The higher-order system that triggers Jevons Paradox and actually creates massive new jobs isn’t here yet. We’re building electric candles when there could be floodlights.

Until then: Figure out which of your skills are the 90 %. Automate them yourself. Don’t wait for someone else to decide that for you. Then focus on the 10 % that actually make you valuable.

Get into it. Today. Regardless of your role. It barely matters which tool you pick. Just pick one.