The Punk PM #53

Hey there, punk!

I listened to Lenny's conversation with Dan Shipper on the future of AI this week. One thing he said hasn't left me since.

Right now, a lot of people have an aversion to AI-generated content. And I get it, but I think they're aiming at the wrong target. Using an LLM to turn your rough notes into a well-structured document isn't laziness. It's just sensible. The thinking still happened. The AI just did the formatting.

What you should have an aversion to is slop. A strategy document you've thought hard about, then asked Claude to sharpen and critique, is a completely different thing from opening a chat window and typing "write me a strategy about X." One of those is using AI to communicate better. The other is using it to skip the thinking entirely.

Let's get into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

We're drowning in AI-generated content at work. Proposals, strategy docs, user stories, acceptance criteria. If an LLM can write it, someone's letting it.

The real problem isn't the quantity, though. It's the quality. A one-pager built on real research—with Claude as your thinking partner—is not the same thing as a ten-page strategy ChatGPT wrote in less time than it takes to read. We're conflating output with insight, and speed with productivity.

When I was a music journalist, there was a version of this that editors called the press release rehash. A writer, short on time or ideas, would take a band's press release, shuffle the sentences, and file it as a review. It read fine—all the right words in the right places. But it wasn't journalism. No thinking had happened between the source material and the byline. You were distributing someone else's version of events with your name on it.

A lot of what's calling itself product strategy right now is exactly this. ChatGPT-shaped words with your name at the bottom.

This isn't an argument against using AI to write. At work, where clarity and concision matter so much, an LLM is a genuine asset. For sharpening a sentence you've already drafted, structuring an argument you've already made, turning rough notes into something readable. That's AI as a writing tool. That's fine.

But a writing tool and a thinking tool are different things. What a lot of teams are doing right now is reaching for one to do the work of the other, and then wondering why the output feels hollow. Or why nobody acts on it.

The value of a product manager isn't the documents they produce. It's the judgment underneath them. The understanding of the customer, the market, the trade-offs, the things that won't work and why. That's what gets products built and strategies that survive contact with reality. That's what you're being paid for.

That judgment can't be prompted into existence. You either did the thinking or you didn't. An LLM can dress the output up either way.

I wouldn't hire a PM who doesn't use AI. But I'm a lot more interested in whether they enjoy thinking deeply about hard problems than whether they can generate content quickly. Those are very different skills. Only one of them compounds.

No number of slop documents will do that for you.

Action 🚀

Next week, before you open a chat window, spend ten minutes writing down what you actually think first. Not bullet points to feed an AI. Your actual argument.

Then use Claude or ChatGPT to sharpen it.

You'll find out quickly whether you had something to say, or whether you were hoping the AI would figure that out for you.

Inspiration 💡

If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you – Sam Kriss on why AI writing is hollow — not because it's poorly structured, but because there's nobody home behind it. It's not a quality problem; it's a presence problem. Your writing is how you think in public. Outsource it and you've just disappeared. Read more

AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite – Brian Merchant on how the word "democratising" is doing a lot of dishonest work. Tools that strip artists of their wages, their work, and their voice aren't liberating anyone — they're concentrating power upward and calling it progress. Real democratisation requires consent from the people it claims to liberate. Read more

AI's Walking Dog – Brian Eno on why AI strips away the provenance of creative work — the thread back to where an idea came from, who influenced whom, and why it matters. A tool that can't trace its own influences doesn't teach you to trace yours. Learn from the process, or don't call it creativity. Read more

Signing Off ✍️

f this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know. And if you think a friend or colleague would enjoy The Punk PM, feel free to share it with them!

Play it your way,

Toby