I have been in four organisations without engineers. And each time, I have built up an engineering organisation or business from scratch.
Like big business and big tech, Where there is already a well-established engineering structure, development is easy. Just go through the cycle of design, implementation, review and release. But in environments where there are no engineers, or only a few, that process doesn't work at all.
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What is needed in such a situation is, Improvisation.
This is also a jazz concept. Talk to the people, feel the site, start playing, before designing.
In the field without a product manager, The people I talk to are not designers, engineers, Field personnel, manufacturing people, sales people.
Interacting with them, improvise and decide which technologies to introduce and to what extent. In some cases, we don't even write code. Sometimes it is enough just to combine existing tools.
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In the age of AI, this 'improvisation' becomes even more important.
Until now, we wrote the design and piled up the code, weeks to complete the application. But now, the same thing comes out of the AI in 5 minutes.
In other words, the idea of "design then implement " is no longer fits with the speed of business.
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What is needed in the future, People who can talk to the field, build on the fly and react quickly. Programmers who read the air rather than write code.
I call that role the improvisation programmer.
They use AI as a tool, turn the noise coming from the field directly into music.
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It is an improvised session, if you like. The people on site make a "sound" called feedback. The programmers listen to the sounds and improvise the code. This is how applications evolve.
It is no longer "development". It is programming as a performance (session).
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As AI becomes more prevalent, not all companies will need dedicated engineers. With a few improvising programmers, Any company can run the system well enough.
Improvise to the rhythm of the site, improvise to create and improvise to fix. I think this is real engineering in the age of AI.