When the barrier to a functional interface drops, PMs and strategic designers feel it first. The PM who’s been sketching interfaces for years. The strategic designer who can see the product and keeps hearing “six-month build.” I wrote about the barrier itself in The Death of Front-end Development. The question here is what a product person does once it’s gone.
The tools caught up. Component libraries matured. shadcn, Radix, and Material UI give you production-grade building blocks with accessibility baked in. When the Lego bricks are solid, assembling them becomes easy. Product leaders don’t need to keep watching their team drown in backlogs while competitors ship weekly.
AI learned to wire things correctly. Not perfectly, but correctly enough. Starting a project from a boilerplate used to take a day. Now it takes minutes. Web applications abstract the hard parts. Lovable handles authentication and databases. Replit and Vercel handle hosting. The infrastructure that required DevOps knowledge is now a checkbox.
The prompting approach
The prompting approach that works for me is to explain what I want from multiple angles, as if I’m talking to someone who doesn’t know the product. Sometimes my prompt is rambling. “The padding looks off. It needs to be like this design, with this style and that animation.” Voice input with Wispr Flow works even better, because I talk faster than I type.
Agents are juniors that are sometimes brilliant and sometimes stupid, and they all have short-term memory. Mix unrelated stuff in one conversation and they get confused. Different tasks, different windows.
If the agent is confidently wrong about domain logic, I step in. If it’s iterating on implementation details (styling, refactoring, test coverage), I let it run. Trust the AI on how. Verify on what and why.
What works, and what doesn’t
What works: personal productivity tools, internal team tools, prototypes, landing pages, simple data apps.
What doesn’t work yet: complex multi-user systems, SOC 2 and NIS2 compliance, high-traffic production, enterprise integrations, anything where security is critical.
That second list describes most of my work in critical infrastructure. I don’t ask an agent to invent a compliance model. I do ask it to put a rough workflow on screen so an operator, a CISO, or an IT/OT engineer can react to something real. When I can prototype, my conversations with engineering change. The code would make engineers wince. It works. I can click through it. The conversation shifts from “here’s what I want, go build it” to “here’s a working version, how do we make this real?”
This is where product leadership shows up. I’m not handing off requirements anymore. I’m showing direction and clarifying my intent. The prototype isn’t the product. It’s the conversation starter. Throwaway code has replaced the wireframes of the past, and it’s a more complete way to validate an idea, with the team or with the people who will actually use it.
Also in February: The Death of Front-end Development · Front-end Composability · Two Paths for Interface Work
Daniel Arevalo is Product Experience Lead at Omny Security. He builds AI-native tools and writes about design, product leadership, and what it means to direct systems that execute at a speed humans never had before.