The traditional division of labour in tech — programmer, product manager, designer — may be on its way out.
That’s the view of Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, who says he is already seeing a new kind of role emerge at the most forward-thinking companies in Silicon Valley: the builder.
“There’s a nascent concept that is actually playing out,” Andreessen said. “I’m seeing it in a bunch of the early, leading-edge companies in the Valley, which is they’re kind of circling around a job title loosely called ‘builder,’ or something like it.”
The catalyst, he argues, is AI — and what it’s doing to the boundaries between technical roles. “Basically, the idea is that you had these separate jobs in the past of programmer, product manager, and designer. And I’ve been describing what’s happening in the Valley companies as sort of this three-way Mexican standoff, where the programmers think that they don’t need the product managers and the designers anymore, because they can have AI do that. And then each of the other two doesn’t think they need the other two either.”
His prediction is that all three sides of that standoff are right. “The product manager can generate code and design now, and so each of them can do the job of all three. And so the idea is, yeah, the job’s changed. And so now the job is builder.”
Crucially, Andreessen sees multiple entry points into this new role. “You might get on the builder track by coming out of coding or product management, or design, or maybe even something else — customer service, or whatever. But you then become responsible for building complete products. And again, you have this kind of — you’re super-empowered by the AI that can help fill in all the things that are not directly in your background.”
Looking further out, he sees the implications as sweeping. “I think it’s entirely possible that we’re sitting here in ten years, in twenty years or whatever, and the job of coder is gone, but you have this just extraordinary number of builders running around.”
Andreessen’s framing reflects a shift that is already showing up in how major companies organise their teams. LinkedIn collapsed its product manager, designer, frontend, and backend engineer roles into a single “full-stack builder” function, a move described by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as a structural change that increased both scope and velocity. Boris Cherny, the Anthropic engineer who created Claude Code, has similarly predicted that the “software engineer” title will fade, replaced by something closer to “builder” or “product manager” — and pointed to his own team at Anthropic, where PMs, designers, and even the finance lead all code. The convergence Andreessen describes isn’t a future scenario. At the leading edge, it’s already the operating model.