Stratagem360: the AI product manager in a vibe-coding era

Suhas Dhekane, writing on his Stratagem360 Substack in February 2026, argues that the PM role has passed through a threshold: the primary artifact has changed from the written specification to something he calls “context engineering.” In vibe coding environments — where tools like Cursor and Replit take natural language intent and generate working implementations — the bottleneck is no longer whether a developer can build the thing. It is whether the PM can communicate what the thing is supposed to be with enough structure and precision that an AI agent can execute on it reliably.

The piece describes the shift at two levels. At the artifact level, PRDs are giving way to what Dhekane calls “Context Fuel”: structured, intention-rich data that conveys not just feature requirements but underlying logic, edge cases, and decision heuristics. At the organizational level, the change is more disruptive. Non-technical roles — PMs, business analysts, HR staff — can now build functional prototypes without involving an engineering intermediary. This removes the traditional bottleneck but also changes what product managers are being evaluated on.

Dhekane’s argument is that when building capability is democratized, competitive advantage shifts entirely toward deciding what to build. The question changes from “can we ship this?” to “is this the right thing to ship, for the right user, at the right time?” That reframing elevates discovery and validation work — user interviews, feedback synthesis, market analysis — at precisely the moment when AI tools can accelerate those processes too.

The article also introduces the concept of a “Product OS,” a mode of working where product teams operate inside shared repositories of structured product context, and where AI agents are evaluated not just by output quality but by what Dhekane terms “Agentic Reliability” — the capacity of an AI system to execute complex business intent autonomously without requiring constant human correction.

The piece is useful for senior product managers thinking through what their role looks like as generative coding tools become standard team infrastructure, and for teams trying to define what a PM contributes in an environment where the cost of building has dropped significantly.