Every product manager knows this pain. Simple feature. Five different systems. Five different specialists. Should take a week? Try three months.
Now solo developers ship entire products faster than Fortune 500 teams can schedule their kickoff meetings.
This isn't a productivity hack. It's the complete inversion of how software gets built. For fifty years, we optimized for specialization—React experts who won't touch backends, DevOps engineers who don't write application code, data engineers who build pipelines but not products. Each person owned a slice so narrow they couldn't function without the others.
The hidden cost wasn't the headcount. It was the three-week sprint planning, the cross-team dependencies, the blocked tickets waiting for another team's backlog. We optimized for depth and got paralysis.
But with AI orchestration tools like Claude and Cursor, something fundamental shifted. The valuable skill isn't writing perfect code anymore—it's knowing what needs to exist and articulating that clearly to AI systems.
Read the full article on Medium to learn:
- Why orchestrators now beat executors in product development
- How computer science fundamentals matter more (but differently) in the AI era
- The new playbook for generalist dominance with AI tools
- Real examples: How pmtoolkit.ai was built in one weekend
- What this means for team structure and competitive advantage