Andrew Ng says bottleneck in AI startups isn't coding – it's product management

One thing that has changed for me personally is that these days if I’m parsing XML, I might just tell AI to write a parser that can handle these 5 XML files. It might load up a library or it might just roll its own, but one thing that is not going to happen is that I’m not building some beautiful well engineered XML parser which I then open source. I wonder if that is what’s going on?

That sounds worse than using an xml library to parse something

I don't buy this line of pro-AI reasoning. It sounds like more work with less reliable results than just writing the code myself.

First of all, nobody is writing and open sourcing their own XML parser in 2025, so that's hyperbole.

Second, the boilerplate to use most XML libraries can be copy/pasted out of their docs. So where is AI saving you time here? The prompting and other BS is a waste of time and just looks silly, and you still have to read and understand the code. At best it seems like breaking even.

not for hackers