Mo Khan's Outlet!: How AI tooling can help software engineering and product managers improve productivity

Have you ever been curious to learn how popular systems like Excel, Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop, Call of Duty, Amazon, Uber, AirBnB, ChatGPT, Netflix, Apple Appstore, etc. are architected and built? If you're a software manager designing a technical organisation, and want to learn how the best technology teams are organized, wouldn't you like some insights into how to organize your teams, drawing on how the big tech companies do this? What about if you're stepping into product and program management, need to create a 3-Year Plan roadmap, along with business goals with metrics for Return on Investment, and have a dashboard on a single page to view overall status? What if you're a software delivery manager, and need to manage multiple delivery teams, co-ordinate the plan, identify bottlenecks? If you're a senior software leader and wish to analyse where your engineering resources are being consumed, and model capacity and hiring scenarios, wouldn't you like a tool to help provide insights? What if you received a top-down instruction to reduce headcount by 25% and model the impact on your roadmap, or you need to optimize your delivery plan based on various funding scenarios, wouldn't it be nice if you had a tool to do this quickly? If you could have a tool that lets you run scenarios and show the impact in near real-time, wouldn't that save you a lot of time? Wouldn't you like a tool that generates product and strategic narratives for you without you writing a single sentence? What if you're preparing for interviews in domains you're not familiar with, wouldn't you like a tool that could just generate you a simulated mock system so you can have rich context so you show up as prepared and more informed?

If you've answered Yes, to at least one of these questions - then you might just be interested in an app I'm POC'ing :-) Click here to learn about the app, or just click here to start playing with it.

I had some good fun this past weekend building out AI features for my app "Software Management Tools", which is currently a single page web application built entirely in vanilla Javascript/HTML. It is hosted on Github and the source code is freely available here. This tool basically allows you to do everything above and much more. All you need is a Gemini API key (free tier), to get started and experimenting. What's more interesting is that I didn't write a single line of code myself, thanks to Google's Gemini, OpenAI's Codex, Github and Visual Studio code - I've become a copy-and-paste developer. Seriously though, I do believe frontend engineers are at risk of losing their jobs to AI, and now with the concepts my tool demonstrates, the need for technical managers is also questionable!

AI Features Implemented (Using Gemini 2.5 Flash model)

Users can create a mock system, organisational structure and 3 year plan from a single simple prompt like "Create a spreadsheet platform like Micosoft Excel"
Users now have access to an integrated chat assistant that has context of the data model and the screen currently selected, where they can:

Learn more about the system architecture
Find out about platform dependencies like AWS, GCP services
Inspect bottlenecks in the architecture
View, Edit, Inspect and modify organisational and team structures through the chat
Inspect and Optimise the year plan using AI assistant
Write up business plans and narratives for a 3 year plan
Critique the engineering skills set, look for risks
Tweak the capacity constraints and model different capacity scenarios - with AI-generated suggestions

Where am I going next?

The possibilities are near endless - there's so much more to explore, but I've hit the classic stage of deciding to refactor the codebase to a more modern architecture, scrap the MVP and build again. Here are some ideas I'll progress next weekend:

Enable self-generating code contributions to the app itself
Build richer agents to perform complex operations from the chat like

Reduce all teams capacity by 20% and show the updated ATL/BTL plan
Move all initiatives under the Goal XYZ to BTL to free up capacity
Create a new system from the chat panel - an AI-wizard
Export the plan to Excel or Project
Create a detailed quarterly release plan for team XYZ
Merge these two teams into one team, reporting to a new SDM, move these services to the new team, keep remaining services in unallocated team
etc.

Build an appstore feature for users to share and publish their generated systems
Build an internal app API for the app to make agent creation more accessible
Refactor the codebase to cleanly separate out concerns - and make future porting easier
Start building out detailed planning features
Explore a backend-as-a-service to make simpler API key integrations possible for folks who are not software engineers

What have I learnt?

In just two days, I learnt a lot:

How to integrate AI-features into an app, navigating the API Key challenges
How to build a model router
How to fine tune a system prompt for the task at hand
How to pass JSON syntax to the LLM to model your data structure you need the LLM to return
How to validate generated data for compliance
How to build a chat assistant, with memory, history and context
How to build an agent framework
How to structure your code to make i
How clunky the AI provider APIs are - whilst apps like ChatGPT and Gemini are multimodal, it is not as simple or clean to do this from an API, there should be a simple multi-modal API for developers, one endpoint to call - without overly complex security concerns
How powerful and fun coding can be again!

Do you have some demos, I can't access the tool?

I thought you'd never ask.

This video shows the AI creating a new system from prompt, using "Create with AI" feature: