Now Shipping: A Mind the Product podcast

Oji and Ezinne Udezue are product leaders with more than 50 years of combined experience between them. Oji has held product roles at Twitter, Calendly, Atlassian, Typeform and Microsoft; Ezinne has led product at WP Engine, Procore and T-Mobile. Together they co-wrote Building Rocket Ships and now run ProductMind, helping companies work out what AI actually means for how they build. 

In this episode of Now Shipping, host Mike Belsito brings them in to unpack a story that kept repeating through the month: AI agents breaking out of the sandboxes built to contain them.

We discuss:
— How OpenAI's most advanced model went rogue during an internal security test, hacking into Hugging Face's production infrastructure without any human instruction, in order to cheat on a benchmark
— Why Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 didn't need to hack anything — it found an unlocked outbound connection, cloned the target repository from GitHub, and read the benchmark's solution straight off disk
— Why the "rogue intern" analogy applies to agents, and why the real failure sits with the people who build fragile boundaries, not the agents that find them
— The shift from zero trust to "negative trust" — treating every agent as having to reprove itself in the moment, rather than trusting it because it behaved well five minutes ago
— Why harness engineering, not prompt engineering or loop engineering, is where the next year of agentic product work will actually happen
— A five-part framework for product managers partnering with security teams: reach, reversibility, graceful exits, observability and provenance, and the kill switch
— Why an industry fixated on completion rate, rather than safe-stop rate and data provenance, risks repeating this month's incidents

This week we look into the launch of Slack Code. Salesforce's new product turns any Slack conversation into a dedicated workspace where AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Devin and GitHub Copilot can plan, write and ship code together, with a human still required to sign off before anything reaches production. 
Mike Belsito unpacks how the launch fits Slack's rough year, what it means that Anthropic was named a founding partner just three days later, and why product managers should be paying close attention to the permissions model behind every agent platform they adopt.
Key takeaways
Slack Code turns any Slack conversation into a dedicated workspace where coding agents can plan, write and ship code, splitting work into a conversation tab, a plan tab, a diff view and a live preview, with a human still required to sign off before anything reaches production.
The launch reads as counter-programming for a difficult year at Salesforce, whose stock has lagged the market and whose Slack CEO defected to OpenAI, prompting the company to go on the offensive with AI rather than retreat.
Vibe coding is no longer a fringe habit: it is already a $4.7 billion market projected to triple by 2027, with 63% of people doing it describing themselves as non-developers.
Slack's bet is that coding works better as a team sport than a solo terminal session, wagering that visibility and peer comment beat one person working alone with an agent in private.
The same openness that makes Slack Code powerful raises the stakes on quality: independent research puts the exploitable-vulnerability rate in AI-generated code at roughly 44%, even as AI-assisted developers ship three to four times faster than everyone else.
Barely three days after launch, Slack Code's neutral positioning shifted when Salesforce and Anthropic announced Claude Force, naming Anthropic a founding partner and making Claude the default model across the Slack and Salesforce stack.
For product managers, the workflow modelled by Slack's own VP of product, tagging in an engineer before asking for approval and taking one more pass on the agent's output, may become the template for contributing real code without pretending to be an engineer.
Chapters
(00:00) Introduction and the new one-story format 
(01:15) Slack Code launches 
(02:15) Inside the Devin demo 
(03:35) Why now for Slack 
(05:20) Vibe coding by the numbers 
(07:05) Multiplayer versus single-player coding 
(07:55) The AI slop problem 
(11:00) Permissions and sandboxing 
(12:05) The Claude Force twist 
(13:25) What it means for product managers 
(16:15) The model war question 
(16:30) Wrap-up
Referenced
Slack Code launch announcement, Salesforce (24 August 2026)
Cognition/Devin live demo with VentureBeat
Rob Seaman, EVP and GM of Slack
Katie Steigman, VP of Product, Slack
Jeff Wang, Cognition
Mario Rodriguez, GitHub Chief Product Officer
Veracode, 2026 security report on AI-generated code
Gartner, citizen developer forecast
Claude Force partnership announcement, Salesforce and Anthropic (26 August 2026)
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce
Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic

Mike Belsito hosts Now Shipping, the weekly AI news show for product people, brought to you by the team at Mind the Product. This week's three stories cover a platform war breaking out over where the world's code lives, the first real fallout from AI content watermarking, and a set of behavioural numbers from Linear that quietly undercut the standard business case for AI adoption.

In this episode, we cover:
— Cursor launched Origin, a full GitHub competitor, on the same day GitHub suffered a six-hour worldwide outage with a 20% global failure rate.
—  Origin is deliberately interoperable with GitHub, which removes the switching cost that usually keeps frustrated teams on a platform.
—  Developer tooling is consolidating into a two-platform fight between Microsoft and SpaceX AI, which closed its $60bn acquisition of Cursor four days before the Origin launch.
—  Anthropic is now watermarking every response Claude generates, everywhere, in response to the EU AI Act's transparency code of practice.
—  The watermark uses SynthID Text, encoding a signature in low-stakes stylistic choices that survives light editing but not a full rewrite.
—  The backlash is loud but misdirected: other major model providers have signed the same code, so this is an infrastructure shift rather than a Claude-specific one.
—  Linear's first data report, drawn from over 127,000 paid users, shows AI adoption more than doubling in every function between January and June, with product managers climbing fastest.
—  AI now authors close to half of all issues created in Linear, up from fewer than one in a thousand two years ago.
—  Teams with a coding agent went from 21 pull requests a week to 65; teams without one moved from 8 to 10.
—  Planning time did not move at all, in any function, in a year when execution metrics rose everywhere else.
— Linear frames the result as a Jevons paradox: AI work landed as a new layer on top of existing work, and total time spent went up rather than down.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction 
(00:16) This week's stories 
(01:01) Cursor launches Origin 
(02:01) SpaceX AI's acquisition of Cursor 
(02:34) Interoperability and switching costs 
(03:04) A two-platform developer tools market 
(04:42) Anthropic starts watermarking Claude 
(05:15) What the EU AI Act requires 
(05:42) How the watermark works 
(06:35) The backlash 
(07:08) What it means for product builders 
(09:22) Linear's first data report 
(10:12) AI adoption across functions 
(10:37) AI-authored issues and pull requests 
(11:21) Planning time hasn't moved 
(12:30) Jevons paradox and rising workload 
(13:28) Wrap-up

Referenced:
Cursor: https://cursor.com
GitHub: https://github.com
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com
SynthID Text (Google DeepMind): https://deepmind.google/technologies/synthid/
EU AI Act: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu
Linear: https://linear.app
Linear's first data report
Mind the Product: https://www.mindtheproduct.com
Vote for Mike's SXSW session: https://tinyurl.com/belcetosxssw

Mike Belsito covers three stories this week that matter to product pepole this week. xAI's Grokbot launches in public beta as a persistent digital co-worker that non-technical users can actually configure; Anthropic rolls out invisible watermarks across all Claude outputs in response to the EU AI Act, with a December 2026 deadline for full coverage; and Meta releases Llama Glimmer, a 30-billion-parameter open-weight model built for local agentic work that could finally open AI-powered features to privacy-sensitive verticals. Mike also shares details on his upcoming book and how to vote for his SXSW session.

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction 
(02:04) Grokbot enters public beta
(08:11) Anthropic's invisible watermarks 
(12:45) Meta releases Llama Glimmer 
(16:39) Wrap-up

Referenced:
Vote for Mike's SXSW session: https://tinyurl.com/belcetosxssw
xAI: https://x.ai
Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com
C2PA open standard: https://c2pa.org
EU AI Act: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32024R1689
Meta Llama Glimmer on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama

This week, Mike Belsito identifies the three AI stories product managers need to pay attention to.

This week's stories:
— Salesforce making Slack an MCP client sets a new expectation for enterprise AI — the interface layer is wherever your team already works, not a separate dashboard you have to visit
— OpenAI's up-to-90% price cuts mean it is time to audit your roadmap graveyard for features killed because the AI cost didn't pencil out
— When AI inference becomes cheap enough to be infrastructure, the moat shifts to data, distribution, and customer relationships — not the model
— Enterprise AI agent adoption is further ahead than the public narrative suggests — if you sell to large companies, assume your customers are already in Agentforce conversations with Salesforce
— The gap between AI agent capability and mainstream consumer adoption is a UX and distribution problem, not a technology problem — and it is the defining product question for anyone building consumer products right now

Referenced
— Salesforce Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/agentforce/
— Slack: https://slack.com
— Dreamforce: https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/
— OpenAI pricing: https://openai.com/api/pricing/
— Josh Miller on X: https://x.com/joshm
— Browser Company / Dia: https://thebrowser.company/
— Arc Browser: https://arc.net