The GenAI Product Management Traps

Feature Factory / Kitchen Sink

GenAI greatly reduces the barrier to directly and quickly build features which makes it very easy to act as a feature factory and build a kitchen sink of a product. One that is not true to a design or have an opinionated view.

• When implementation is cheap, it's easy to end up in a mess.
• When you try to make everyone happy, you end up not making anyone happy.

Big Design Upfront / Waterfall Software Development

In an attempt to prevent GenAI from making mistakes there is a focus on front loading effort in the specs and requirements. 

• We need to iterate and have to discover what we are building
• Action precedes clarity
• Account for emergence

All these issues boil down to the question of Are We Building the Right Product?

GenAI Multi-Pass

Given the non-deterministic nature of GenAI and a near future where software development might not involve opening an IDE to write software, one way to catch issues might be to take a multi-pass approach where each pass is specialised for a specific purpose, so as to not overload the LLM with too many things to take care of at one time. Some of these multi-passes could be:

• Coding Pass
• Code Quality Pass
• Security Pass
• Performance Pass

Each of these passes could result in improvements tasks and this could be an iterative process till a certain threshold is met.

The Excitement and Frustration of using GenAI for Software Developement

Exciting

• The possibilities that GenAI enables makes software development truly exciting again.

Addictive

• It's so easy to convert ideas to working software, it can be very addictive and you can quickly loose any sense of time. 
• It keeps you from wasting time, being unproductive or procrastinating

Frustrating

• The non-deterministic nature of GenAI can make it very frustrating.

Time Sink

• It's very easy to get sucked into long conversations, and issues specific to GenAI, than spending time actually building.

My Criteria for when to use Vibe Coding

 Here is my personal criteria for when it's appropriate to Vibe Code

1. Internal Use / Personal Software
2. One-off throwaway tools/scripts/code
3. Experiments
4. Prototypes

The Hyderabadi Biryani Problem

 Everyone says Hyderabadi Biryani is amazing but if you say you didn't like the Hyderabadi Biryani you tried, they will ask you which restaurant you tried it at and then the inevitable answer will be "Oh, that one isn't good, you should try it at XYZ Biryani House" and so on till infinity. There is ALWAYS a restaurant where the biryani is better than the one you didn't like.

Stumbled upon another security hole at a well know Indian company's website that is leaking their customer's sensitive personal information

 I've stumbled upon another security hole at a well know Indian company's website that is leaking their customer's sensitive information.

Just like the Myntra security hole that I found a long time ago (which resulted in them setting up their Responsible Disclosure Policy), this hole too is just something I stumbled upon while using their website regularly. I didn't have to do anything special that a regular user wouldn't do and there is no "hack" involved. It simply seems to be a case of bad implementation or a bug that anyone with a decent technical background can easily recognize and take advantage of.

My Myntra report was in Dec 2013 and in the 7 years since, nothing much has changed with Indian companies taking security seriously or even setting up a basic responsible disclosure policy 😔.

For now I've sent an email to security@ their website address which thankfully didn't bounce and I've also messaged them on a few of their social accounts. Will wait for them to respond and give them time to fix it before publishing more details.

Update (Oct 5, 2020): emails to security@ their website bounced after 24 hrs 😔

Pic source: https://www.needpix.com/photo/download/929205/key-hole-eye-by-looking-spy-spying-on-watch-burglary-burglar-privacy-policy