Tyler Folkman

Things Tyler Says on Podcasts

Chief AI Officer at JobNimbus | Building AI that solves real problems | 10+ years scaling AI products | LinkedIn Top Voice

Where to Find Them

Tyler Folkman writes The AI Architect , writes Fish Food for Thought , writes next play and writes Millennial Masters . They have also been a guest on Product Growth and The Growth Podcast .

Recently: “STOP Trusting AI Leaderboards — Bench the Part You Actually Own” on The AI Architect (October 2026); “Before I write about this publicly” on The AI Architect (October 2026); “What It Costs to Run Your Own AI Now” on The AI Architect (October 2026); “My Agent Spent 32,524 Tokens Before It Even Read a File” on The AI Architect (September 2026); “I Ran 60 AI Agents for a Full Day on Jev, the Model That Can't Talk. It Cost 35 Cents.” on The AI Architect (September 2026); “I Cut My AI Coding Bill From $200 to $20 by Routing Jobs, Not Downgrading” on The AI Architect (September 2026).

What They Said

“The customer doesn't experience your defect rate. They experience the number of defects that you push out there.” — Tyler Folkman, The Growth Podcast

Folkman was explaining why the uptime of large companies looks worse than it has in years. His argument is that their quality did not get worse, they are simply shipping far more code at the same defect rate, so the same percentage now reaches many more people. It is his case for spending AI-won speed on quality checks rather than on shipping again.

The Growth Podcast · 2026-09-04 Permalink → Listen →
The Growth Podcast Around 52:15 into the episode
Tyler Folkman

…take. And that was more like six months ago that people that I would hear that when Claude was newer on the scene, especially for PMs. I'm like, no, Claude does not. You ask Claude how long it'll take six months ago, and it's like, oh, a week. And they'd say, go build it, and it'd be like, built.

Aakash Gupta

…hooks are, when I need to use them. Talk to me a little bit about from product to engineering. What engineering loops should be out there? What engineering hooks should be out there? And then PMs, like interfacing with engineers. When does the PM work? PM loops end and the engineering loops begin.

Tyler Folkman

Some of the most important loops for engineers right now are quality loops. The thing that people don't talk enough about, in my opinion, is if you ship, let's say, twice as fast with AI and your quality rate maintains the same rate. Let's say you have a 1% bug defect ratio or something. Your customer experiences twice as many bugs if your quality doesn't improve. The customer doesn't experience your defect rate. They experience the number of defects that you push out there. And so we're seeing this. I mean, you look at big companies, their uptime is the worst it's been in a long time. And my opinion is it's not that their quality got worse, actually. It's that they're just. Just shipping more code. And so more things go wrong at the same rate. And we've seen that. And so we've really started and tried to invest in quality improvements through loops for engineering…

Aakash Gupta

And should PMs be pushing PRs? Where does that go till? Should PMs be working on engineering tasks at all? I

Tyler Folkman

think it's definitely appropriate for PMs to work on engineering tasks where it makes sense. Like, let me give an example. I don't know if I'd put a PM working on our back end billing system and making upgrades to it that could impact people's money flow and all that. There's a lot of like…

Aakash Gupta

Okay, so that's one part of it, which is PMs doing engineering work. It sounds like PMs shouldn't be trying to become engineers, but if they're doing some front-end changes where, again, they have put in probably more time on it than the reviewer would need to, then it might make sense. What about…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“…I would argue that some AI slop is actually better than human slop that I've seen before AI.” — Tyler Folkman, Product Growth

Aakash Gupta has just asked Folkman how to build a workflow that avoids slop. Folkman pushes back on the premise before answering, pointing out that the pre-AI baseline was not good documents and good code but people copying from Stack Overflow. He is chief AI and product officer at a company selling AI workflows, which makes the concession an odd one to volunteer.

Product Growth · 2026-09-04 Permalink → Listen →
Product Growth
Tyler Folkman

…the effort over to another person, right? Like, you just keep bouncing the level of effort around where it's like, oh, I need you to do this thing. Okay, I'll have AI do it and then I'll send it back to you. And you're like, Okay, I mean, I could have done that. So, like, what was the value add

Aakash Gupta

exactly? So, how do we create like a non-slop loop? Maybe you can help us like program a loop from scratch. And

Tyler Folkman

non-slop is kind of interesting because you hear the word slop thrown around a lot. And I would argue that some AI slop is actually better than human slop that I've seen before AI. And so, one thing I like to remind people is before AI, we did not live in a perfect utopia of only good documents and good code running around the universe. A lot of stuff was bad. People don't like to remember, but we used to copy and paste code from Stag Overflow, right? Like it was not that different than AI, just less efficient. So, for me, when I think about writing a good skill, and we…

Aakash Gupta

about the average length of responses between like and Opus 4.6. They're like in one realm, and then Opus 5 is just like so wordy.

Tyler Folkman

It's so wordy. It definitely for me regressed. It sounds more like AI than any AI I've used. It's insane.

Speaker 4

Quick thought experiment for you. Is there anything in this video you should be trying on your own? If there is, try it. Take a screenshot, post it on LinkedIn, and tag me. I'd love to see what you're learning. Now, a quick word from our sponsors before we get into the back half of the pod. I used…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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