The Accidental Product Manager: AI Coding's Unwanted Promotion

The role shift is not hypothetical and not distant. The Bluesky post that sharpened the conversation this week was not a think-piece about futures — it was a field report from two working developers, independently describing the same experience: directing AI had made them managers of a system they never agreed to manage ^[2]. The author's response was not triumphant. It was a question about retention that the industry has not answered.