I recently listened to Ezra Klein’s interview of Brian Eno from 2025 (link), which was just re-uploaded to Klein’s podcast feed.

The overall interview is delightful. One of the things Eno mentioned was the importance of having a “practice” as a musician or artist, something he learned from the work of John Cage.

It got me to thinking: do I engage in a practice in a way that supports my work? If I am honest, it hasn’t been the case throughout a lot of my career. Reading, discussing, and using other products can support a PM’s work, but to me, only doing that outside of work doesn’t constitute a practice because these are passive activities.

I’ve always dabbled in side projects, but that didn’t feel much like product work. Because of my limited coding ability, that always felt more like learning to code and building technical knowledge. I couldn’t do enough on my own to where it feel like I was exercising my product muscle.

Recently, however, it’s felt different thanks to AI. For the past several weeks, I’ve been able to launch full projects in the scope of a weekend, which I would have taken months to do before. The speed and scope are amazing in themselves, but what feels special now is that it feels a lot more like doing product work in my day job. I’m spending less time wrestling with getting code and services working, and spending more time thinking about what I want to build and how it should work.

And so finally, I do feel like now I can truly have a product practice in a way that an artist can have a practice that goes throughout their life. It’s still early of course for this, but it’s incredibly exciting.

What changed?

What’s changed recently to allow this? Of course, the models have gotten better. With Fable, Opus 5, and the other equivalents out there, things just get done. The limitation is much more now your ability to articulate what you want. Isn’t that most of the battle with product management?

But it’s not just the models. I think it’s also that the services and infrastructure around the models has gotten better now so that they can do complete product development tasks on their own, including deployment and release.

In my case, I’ve been making heavy use of the Cloudflare CLI, which is incredible because it enables an agent to basically do everything in Cloudflare on its own. And there isn’t much in terms of web products that you can’t do on Cloudflare.

Even 6 months ago, while the models had their incredible inflection point around Opus 4.7, to me it still was about driving better code.

But, now, it’s at the point where I feel like I can just work with models to do things as I normally would with a developer and a designer. In a weekend project, I can do product work: set priorities, make decisions, and critique work in progress. In my day job and if I look back throughout my career, how many product decisions and moments like this do I have during a week? Not too many. But with a product practice in off hours, I can double or quadruple the number of decisions I can choose to make in a week. I hope it helps make me sharper in my day job, but it’s also gratifying for personal projects in a way that was so hard before.