Email's resilience is almost paradoxical — it's the least "designed" communication tool we use daily, yet the most durable. Slack added presence and speed. Notion added structure. And yet none of them replaced email's core role.
I think the reason is that email is fundamentally asynchronous and unbounded — you can send anything to anyone, with no shared platform, no mutual agreement required. That's not a bug, it's the entire point. Every "better" tool that replaced it added friction by requiring both sides to opt in.
Interestingly, even AI hasn't disrupted it — if anything, AI has made email more valuable by making it easier to write well and filter noise. The protocol survives because no single company owns the incentive to kill it.
I'm a product manager — no coding background, never wrote a line in my life. Yet here I am, building a video editing tool solo. Not just "I made a prototype" solo. I mean designing the full product architecture, iterating on UX, and shipping features. Alone.
What's striking isn't just that AI lowers the barrier to coding. It's that it finally closes the gap between having a clear product vision and being able to execute on it. The bottleneck used to be engineering. Now it's just... thinking.
To the engineers feeling devalued: I understand the frustration. But what I need from AI isn't what I needed from a senior engineer. I need a tireless executor for a vision I already have. The judgment, the taste, the "why does this matter" — that's still entirely human
I'm a product manager with no coding background, building a video editing tool from scratch — solo. The core idea is to rethink the editing workflow entirely around agents rather than manual timelines. Most existing tools still treat AI as a feature bolted on top; I'm trying to make the agent the primary interface.
Also been running myself as a one-person ops team using AI for data analysis, writing, and research. Honestly, it's changed my intuition about where human judgment actually matters. Fewer places than I expected
But in this day and age of Vibe Coding being so simple, do people still need such a page? Your users are developers, they'll definitely use Vibe Coding, so why not just say a few words and set up a website to collect email addresses? That would be more customized.
Honesty, the shopping experience on Amazon is really bad. If you've ever used Chinese e-commerce websites, you'll find that most of them are much better than Amazon. Not only are the products cheap enough, but the logistics are fast, and the customer service, website experience, and so on are all great. I think the reason is that they face too little competition.
With AI, I can independently build my own products. I'm no longer confined to being a product manager; I'm a true developer. Thanks to my previous coding experience and entrepreneurial ventures as a product manager, AI has accelerated all my skills. Perhaps most of my skills were just starting out before, but with AI, they can quickly transform into productivity and rapidly improve in practice.
What I dislike is that the market has become more cutthroat. It requires more energy to build, build, build faster.
I think the reason is that email is fundamentally asynchronous and unbounded — you can send anything to anyone, with no shared platform, no mutual agreement required. That's not a bug, it's the entire point. Every "better" tool that replaced it added friction by requiring both sides to opt in.
Interestingly, even AI hasn't disrupted it — if anything, AI has made email more valuable by making it easier to write well and filter noise. The protocol survives because no single company owns the incentive to kill it.
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