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Imagine you invest time and energy into building a product or service. Then imagine watching your time and talent reproduced by AI in a fraction of the cost and time. It’s part of a lament shared by many independent software consultants, one expressed well by Andy Cutler in his recent year-in-review post titled 2025.
Apply that same logic to managers of products designed to, for example, simplify the orchestration automation of data integration package executions. For me, Andy’s laments begin to hit home.
In this paywalled offering, I share my perspective as a product developer / manager and consultant in the emerging era of AI, the problems I am trying to solve, and how I am trying to solve them. Become a paid subscriber to read this article in its entirety, and I’ll include access to my AI-Assisted Data Engineering Development Playbook.
The post image is generated by Nano Banana using the prompt “Create a simple cartoon image depicting a human hand placing a coin into a coin slot.” My intent was to visualize the pay-as-you-go API option available from Claude, which is one of the topics in this newsletter.
The answer, I've found, isn't to compete with AI — it's to...
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