The Case Against Doomerism - by Nikunj Kothari

Eleven years as a product manager. Roadmaps. Stakeholder alignment. Coordinating engineering, design, sales. Translating chaos into shipping software. No founder asks for a PM anymore. They want builders or sellers. The chaos I helped master? AI handles it now. Maybe not as well as the best PMs. But, well enough that paying a human $300K to do it looks like a luxury most startups can’t justify. So I get the doomers. I’d be staring at my own obsolescence. There’s a shift happening. You can feel it. The tools got better. You can smell the smoke. 2026 is when this fear goes mainstream. Capabilities will stop feeling like tools and start feeling like magic. Models completing in minutes what used to take days. Agents running autonomously for hours. Code, research, analysis flowing at speeds that make your current workflow look ancient. Magic we don’t understand terrifies us. The backlash will intensify. Communities will form around refusal. Doomerism will feel like the ethical position, the

Eleven years as a product manager. Roadmaps. Stakeholder alignment. Coordinating engineering, design, sales. Translating chaos into shipping software. No founder asks for a PM anymore. They want builders or sellers. The chaos I helped master? AI handles it now. Maybe not as well as the best PMs. But, well enough that paying a human $300K to do it looks like a luxury most startups can’t justify. So I get the doomers. I’d be staring at my own obsolescence. There’s a shift happening. You can feel it. The tools got better. You can smell the smoke. 2026 is when this fear goes mainstream. Capabiliti