š” What actually changed about being a PM (and more)
Hi friends,
New section today at the bottom: side project updates! And if you haven't seen the TL;DL redesign yet, you have to check it out. It's š„, if I may say so myself.
To the links!
Rian
Full Posts
What actually changed about being a PM
A practical update on how AI has reshaped day-to-day PM work. The post covers "Fear-Driven Development" as a way to stay close to the craft, layered context files (CLAUDE.md and friends) that let Claude Code and OpenCode behave consistently across projects, and the shift from PRDs as the central artifact to evals as where behavior actually gets defined. There's also a customer escalation workflow ā running first-pass CUSTESC analysis through Claude with the right MCP servers wired up to take investigation load off engineering.
Two small new things on the blog
Two small additions since migrating off WordPress: GitHub releases for side projects now auto-post to the blog (with an endpoint that validates the release-notes shape), and the feed is now split into six separate RSS feeds ā essays, links, quotes, releases, summary, and everything ā so you can subscribe only to the bits you want.
Link Posts
- Product Roadmaps: How the Best Product Teams Plan for Uncertainty ā Teresa Torres on Now/Next/Later. Each column should hold a different type of thing: solutions in Now, opportunities in Next, outcomes in Later.
- Deezer: AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new uploaded music ā Almost 75,000 AI tracks land on Deezer every day but only account for 1ā3% of streams, with 85% flagged as fraudulent. Almost nobody is actually listening to the AI tracks.
- AI Prototyping Is Changing How We Build Products at Uber ā When prototyping is fast and cheap, the PRD becomes a record of intent and the tradeoffs made along the way.
- Org Design in the Age of AI ā A case for redesigning org structures from a blank sheet instead of bolting AI onto the shape you already have.
- The peril of laziness lost ā Bryan Cantrill on how human time pressure is what produces elegant, efficient designs; LLMs have no such constraint, so they keep piling on complexity instead of stripping it out.
- Is Hip-Hop in Decline? A Statistical Analysis ā Hip-hop's shrinking chart share comes down to late-adopter streaming behavior. Latin, K-pop, country, and legacy formats are picking up the slack.
Side project releases
- tldl v2.3.0 ā Per-podcast email subscriptions with double-opt-in, preference management, and DKIM/SPF-aligned sending from tldl-pod.com.
- discogs-mcp v3.2.0 ā Adds catalog-wide search, fixes owned-marker accuracy across pressings, and tightens genre/style matching to exact terms.
- tldl v2.2.0 ā RSS-direct monitoring with conditional GETs cuts episode detection lag from hours to minutes, plus audio-URL dedup catches republished episodes.
