Product Strategy • December 2025

LLM Agents Will Not Replace Engineers — But They Will Replace Your PRD

LLM agents are not here to replace engineers. They cannot reason about systems the way a senior engineer can, cannot handle ambiguity the way a seasoned PM can, and cannot take end-to-end responsibility for a feature. But they will replace something else entirely: The traditional Product Requirements Document (PRD).

The PRD as We Know It Is Dying

For decades, the PRD has been the central artifact of software development. Word docs in the 90s. Confluence pages in the 2000s. Notion templates in the 2020s. Different formats, same limitations:

Most importantly:

Traditional PRDs are designed for humans to interpret. Agentic systems require machines to execute.

This mismatch makes the traditional PRD fundamentally incompatible with the emerging landscape of Agentic Engineering.

Why LLM Agents Do Not Replace Engineers

It is tempting to assume that as LLMs improve, they will replace software engineers. But this misunderstands both engineering and intelligence.

1. Engineering is not just coding

Engineering includes:

Agents can generate code, but they cannot take accountability for these decisions.

2. Engineers think in systems; models think in tokens

Models generate plausible next tokens. But engineering demands deep causal reasoning:

LLMs do not run simulations. They pattern-match examples.

3. Humans innovate; models interpolate

Engineers create new paths. Models remix existing ones.

But LLM Agents Will Replace the PRD

Even though LLMs cannot replace engineers, they absolutely will replace traditional PRDs — because PRDs were never designed for machines.

The PRD is a lossy communication artifact

A PM writes a PRD → a developer interprets → a tech lead reinterprets → QA reinterprets → support reinterprets. Every step introduces drift.

Traditional PRD workflow is a giant lossy compression pipeline, converting product intent into increasingly unstable approximations.

Agents need something different: structured, machine-readable specifications

Agents cannot reliably consume prose. They need:

In short: LLM agents require a new type of PRD: The Agentic PRD.

Full deep-dive here: Agentic PRD — Designing Requirements for AI-Driven Engineering

Why an Agentic PRD Replaces the Traditional PRD

An Agentic PRD moves from:

Traditional PRD Agentic PRD
Human-readable prose Machine-readable structure
Ambiguous & subject to interpretation Executable & verifiable
Lives in docs/tickets Lives as structured artifacts accessible via MCP
Manually synced with engineering Self-updating as part of the code lifecycle

This fundamentally changes how requirements are consumed, interpreted, and implemented.

The Agentic PRD Lifecycle

1. PM authors structured requirements in ProdMoh

Instead of prose, they produce: 

{
  "id":"S-210",
  "title":"Apply paid badge to priced items",
  "acceptance":[
    {"type":"predicate","expr":"price > 0 implies badges.includes('paid')"}
  ],
  "examples":[
    {"price":100,"badges":["paid"]},
    {"price":0,"badges":[]}
  ]
}

2. ProdMoh publishes the PRD via MCP

Product intent becomes accessible through:


GET /mcp/prd/S-210
Authorization: Bearer <token>

3. IDE agent fetches the machine-readable PRD

This eliminates interpretation errors entirely.

4. Agent generates tests before generating code

This flips the development workflow.

5. Agent generates implementation aligned with tests

Satisfying constraints is guaranteed.

6. CI validates implementation against PRD

Feature drift becomes mathematically impossible.

Why PRDs Must Become Executable

Humans work well with prose; machines do not. To collaborate with agents, we must provide executable specifications instead of memos.

Executable PRD is the new API contract

Just as Swagger/OpenAPI revolutionized backend collaboration, Agentic PRDs revolutionize product → engineering collaboration.

More on Executable Specifications: Executable Specifications — The Future of Product Engineering

Why MCP Is the Catalyst for PRD Replacement

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides:

Without MCP, the Agentic PRD cannot exist. With MCP, it becomes inevitable.

What Happens to PMs When PRDs Disappear?

PRDs are not going away — the format is. PMs evolve from:

PMs who understand structured requirements will become the most valuable operators in the organization.

Concrete Example — Traditional PRD vs Agentic PRD

Traditional acceptance criteria:


User sees a badge if the item is paid.
Badge should be shown quickly.

Agentic PRD acceptance criteria:

{
  "acceptance":[
    {"type":"predicate","expr":"price > 0 implies badges.includes('paid')"},
    {"type":"invariant","expr":"badge_render_time < 150ms"}
  ],
  "examples":[
    {"price":199,"badges":["paid"]},
    {"price":0,"badges":[]}
  ]
}

This is the level of clarity LLM agents require.

The Future: PRDs as Living, Executable, Machine-Native Specifications

In the next 3–5 years, every PRD will become:

This is not optional — it is an inevitability driven by:

The entire SDLC is becoming AI-native. PRDs must evolve to survive.

Conclusion: Agents Augment Engineers — But Replace PRDs Entirely

The Transition

Engineers stay. Designers stay. PMs stay. But the traditional PRD will disappear and be replaced by machine-executable specifications.

This is the core of Agentic Engineering: A system where product intent is expressed unambiguously, consumed by agents, verified through tests, and enforced throughout the development lifecycle.

The future of product development is not automated engineering. It is aligned engineering.

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