🥞 Carl's Newsletter is Dead! Welcome to The Full Stack PM

Hello!

It's been over a year since you last heard from me – an eternity in newsletter years. But I have a good reason: I've been heads-down learning, building, and completely rethinking what product management means in the age of AI.

Let me explain.

Early this year, Andrej Karpathy's famous vibe coding tweet hit my feed just as it was going viral. My timeline was absolutely infected with it for weeks. I bookmarked this guide, where it sat with the other 10,000 bookmarks I save to feel productive but never actually read:

Then one fateful evening, my PS5 decided it needed a 47GB update (seriously Sony, what the fuck). With my night suddenly free, I remembered that vibe coding guide.

I installed Cursor, asked the AI how to get started, kept copy pasting the error messages, and my life would never be the same.

It was non-stop vibe coding over the next few weeks. I built a meme maker with a backend, auth, multiple LLM calls, web scraping, video analysis, and more. Not only was it ridiculously fun, it actually worked. (I now use it to help me create memes for @carlthepm – somehow the world's biggest product meme page). It felt like I learned more about how engineering really works than I had in years as a PM.

Longtime readers will remember my original newsletter "The Futureproof PM" which focused staying on top of AI developments for PMs. Two years ago, that was really just prompts and shitty AI wrappers.

This one project showed me how far AI tooling had evolved.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I quit my senior PM job a month later to explore this full-time.

Here's what I've discovered: Product management isn't dead – it's evolving into something far more powerful.

The PM role has always been about getting things done through others – sweet-talking designers, bribing engineers with promises to fix tech debt, gaslighting stakeholders into thinking that bug is actually a feature. Professional middlemen with good soft skills and some business sense.

But now we can actually BUILD.

Scraping competitor data at 3am because you had a hunch. Building a working prototype in Cursor that actually connects to APIs and writes to a database. Running SQL queries yourself instead of waiting two weeks for the analytics team to tell you "users click the bigger button." Shipping experiments instead of writing requirements.

It's no longer about managing the product, but actually getting our hands dirty in every layer of the product stack.

So I'm relaunching this newsletter as The Full Stack PM.

There's a lot to learn. Design, coding, data analysis, marketing, sales, system architecture – the full product stack. LLMs can help with all of this, but we need to build our skills across all these areas to even understand if they are being helpful.

Amazingly, we can build all these skills simply by building things. What could possibly be more exciting to a product person? I'm in it with you, spending every waking hour researching, connecting, building, building, building – figuring this out and sharing what works.

Here's what to expect every week:

🥞 The Weekly Stack – A fun rundown of all the AI/PM news that matters, none that doesn't. Important developments, new tools, best memes, and which company is pretending their chatbot is revolutionary this week.

Here are the deep dives I’ll send every 2-3 weeks to make them super high quality:

🤔 The Food Critic – Deep dives into industry topics to understand what's really happening and what you need to know.

🧪 The Test Kitchen – Step-by-step guides on building with AI. Think GitHub repos you can fork, Figma files you can play with, and prompts that really work. Tactical stuff.

🥣 The Pantry – Notion databases for AI-powered research, prompt libraries for common PM tasks, and software I build to help you PM. Things you can actually use daily.

And once we really get these hotcakes cookin:

🍳 The Breakfast Club – Community of Full Stack PMs to show off what we're building, how we built it, and what others can learn from it.

My promise: No unearned hype. I hate hype. Hype makes me so angry. We’ve all wasted hours trying "INSANE" AI products only to realize the influencers posting about them never even made accounts. Full Stack is about practical, tested approaches to becoming a more capable PM.

All this, and it's completely free! I'll figure out monetization someday, but right now my sole focus is exploring this space, delivering unbelievable value, and building an amazing community.

Finally, I realize this is my newsletter's second rebrand, and this new direction might not be what you signed up for. Here's your escape hatch:

Still here? Awesome.

The first edition of The Full Stack PM drops tomorrow morning. We’ll cover the reaction to GPT-5 and what OpenAI is doing about it, Perplexity’s bid for Google Chrome and what it says about the upcoming AI browser wars, Sonnet 4’s new 1 million token context window, and more.

Welcome to the future of product management. Let's build amazing things together.

Carl

P.S. Reply and tell me what you're building or want to build with AI. I read every email and feature the best projects in the newsletter.

P.P.S. Yes, I really did quit my job because of vibe coding. No, my parents don't understand either.