All right, guys. Episode disclaimer.
If you're already an expert vibe coder, this episode might not be for you.
But if you've heard of vibe coding and you want to know the facts versus the myths and you're curious about how you can use the technology to advance your own objectives, you are going to love this.
If you haven't been following our newsletters, as in the ones you can subscribe to at theproductmanager .com slash subscribe, I haven't been able to shut up about the awesome hands -on vibe coding workshop we held a few weeks back with Moves the Needle principal, Drew Falkman.
in. This episode of the Product Manager podcast is actually a recording of the 30 -minute seminar we did before jumping into our live prototyping session.
You'll hear a breakdown of what vibe coding is and isn't, inspiring use cases for the tech, and tool recommendations to start playing and discovering use cases of your own.
Let's jump in. Oh, by the way, we hold conversations like this every week.
So if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe?
Okay, now let's jump in.
i'm hannah clark if you don't know me i'm the executive editor for the product manager and the host of the product manager podcast and i've got my co -host katie hi everybody i'm katie sanders i'm executive editor at the cto club maybe also from the qa lead there's some people that we um merge those sites so i'm excited this is my first workshop and really excited to be doing this with hannah because there's a lot of blend between product and cto's so yeah i'm Excited to get to know everybody.
Welcome. And I'm very excited to be working with Katie on this.
If you don't follow her on LinkedIn yet, Katie Sanders, she's such a badass.
She's got some great content.
So I really am excited for you guys to get to know each other.
And I'd love to introduce our featured speaker as well.
We've got Drew Falkman here.
Drew is a product leader, an advisor, an educator, focused on pre -seed to seed product strategy.
He's streamlined early teams. He's optimized for product and market fit.
He's done it all. He's a great friend of the publication.
He's worked with us tons.
and he's worked with me a lot, which tells you that he's a very patient man.
So you guys are in good hands today.
And he also experiences...
He's got a lot of experience in web, mobile, blockchain, and AI products.
So we have an amazing expert here, Drew.
Do you want to say hello to the nice people?
Hey, everyone. Super excited to be here.
This is going to be fun.
So we're going to start by some myth -busting.
And I'll kick us off with the first question.
And then my lovely co -host, Katie, will go through some myths and have Drew debunk them for us.
so we'll start by setting some context seems like everybody is talking about vibe coding and it comes up in like every linkedin post right now including a lot of my own and people either seem to be very excited by it or very scared or very confused so let's talk about why vibe coding is so popular why is it so important right now let's get into the myths around that all right so first myth vibe coding is replacing engineers obviously there's a lot of i mean in general ai is replacing replacing everyone's job.
That's what it's saying.
I would say that that's a myth and that maybe it's changing the engineer's job and it is creating app -ready code, but it's certainly not completely replacing the job of an engineer.
As always with AI, we want to keep a human in the loop.
And so I would say nothing's going to get shipped without human eyeballs.
And so I think we can bust that myth.
Drew, did you have anything to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, I would say it's something thing to be aware of and be cognitive of as an engineer that's coming down the pike.
This could speed up your process.
And as a designer and product manager and non -technical founder, you guys now have the ability to create MVPs and create and validate prototypes and do things and then hand it off to the engineers.
But when you want to get into production level code, generally speaking, past an MVP in this day and age, certainly you need to be doing code review use and going over and making sure that everything is tightened up, especially if there's any sort of compliance issues or anything you need to be aware of.
Right. Well, let's move on to myth number two.
So some people say the vibe coding is a world outside of the dev cycle.
So in other words, if you build something in a vibe coding app that you still, like it's not really usable and that you have to rebuild it completely from the ground up with a Dell helper who's hard coding the whole thing.
Drew, is this really the case?
Well, you know, the tools have evolved so much. And it's one of those things where it's literally changing every day.
Claude just released a new iteration of their code generation within the last month or so, and it's miles better than it was before.
So it's continually improving.
It does just like all generative AI stuff.
It can hallucinate, it can do goofy stuff, it can do things that that are unexpected.
So as part of the cycle, right, it can work into the cycle and you can actually create these sort of code pieces and hand them off to engineers.
But you really need to be conscious that they're going to probably need some reworking.
You might need to reuse some components.
And I think some engineers might be somewhat surprised at how good the code actually is.
Okay. Another myth that I've heard a lot is that you don't need a PRD or product strategy in order to vibe code a tool.
Drew, Katie, thoughts on that?
Look, you always need to think.
I think what happens is sometimes people think like, if I'm vibe coding, I can just like jump in, open it up and have an app tomorrow.
And just like anything else, if you don't put any forethought into it, it's not going to be what you want.
You want to think about who your audience is, who your target market is.
You want to think about what your value proposition is.
You want to think about what the core features features and flows in the app are going to be.
And so it's really worth your time to put together something.
Now, the beauty of it is you don't have to create a five to 10 page PRD that defines the tech that's going to be used and that diagrams all the flows and all that.
You don't have to think about that.
You just want to outline what your vision is, what it is you're building.
And in fact, I've come up with like a little vibe PRD and it's like one to two pages.
And it's just for you and anyone else who you might be collaborating with.
So that you're on the same page and that you can come at it with an organized approach, and that your code is cleaner in the long run.
Well, good to know.
We'll move on to the next myth here about highly regulated industries.
Now, Katie represents the CTO Club.
So did you want to take this myth on, Katie?
Yeah, I think one other one I wanted to touch on is that this is new and tell you, we've been vibe coding for years.
We didn't call it that until recently.
but you know copy pasting from github or reddit or hacker news wherever like great engineers they solve problems they search and pattern match and adapt and build so i think this prompt is just the next evolution of what's always been there and then hannah what was the other one you wanted to bust just that like if you're in a highly regulated industry that you can't vibe code it's not secure yeah like obviously when we think about like health care or finance finance those are highly regulated industries so it's just just with any other industry you know you want to make sure that you're HIPAA compliant
and all of those things I know that LLMs can sometimes pull yeah so just consider compliance issues really any industry but I think that there's a little bit of an extra guardrail when you're thinking about health care or finance or something like that yeah I think it's a kind of like a lot of different development processes where you still, the vibe coding tools don't replace your personnel.
They're just like a compliment to accelerate the development cycle.
But yeah, like a good rigorous code review process.
It's probably more essential than ever now that we're kind of outsourcing some of that work.
All right, let's talk a little bit about some use cases.
It'll be fun to explore a few different ways that people are using vibe coding effectively right now.
Katie will run this section of the show here and go through some of the use cases that were pretty cool.
Cool. I actually, a lot of these I pulled from Reddit.
When vibe coding first started happening, like I wanted to see real world examples of this.
Everybody was talking about it, but I wasn't really able to see anything that was successful.
So I did an article about this.
And one of the things we talked about was this person who built, I think it was like a soccer, it was like a niche soccer game organizer, just like his personal interest hobby.
He was not a developer, but he understood how full stack apps worked.
and he's always had to hire developers to bring his ideas to life.
But as he started playing around with Lovable and Cursor and all these other things, he built this niche soccer game app, and it was just to help him to organize his weekly games.
And he ended up shipping this, and I think successfully, yeah, shipped a 100 -line AI -generated app profitably within weeks, I think was bringing in something like, was it, Michael, was it like $700 a week or something like that?
Another example we found was this one called WorkAid which would, it's a gamified task management powered by AI so like revolutionizing your to -do list with apps to make work feel like a game.
So those were like a couple of successful examples that I pulled from Reddit and we can link you guys to that Reddit post. There were a few more examples of that.
And I think, you know, a lot of people are just going to play around with this, but there are some people who are going to be really successful with this which is really cool to see.
Yeah, that's a very cool example.
example. I did want to just interject quickly because we have a very good question from Katya.
Katya says, I was wondering as a PM, would I even have to still create wireframes and mockups for the front end?
I could just create it with vibe coding, and then the devs can use my front end as a starting point for their own development.
Yes, 100%. In fact, I would say that it would be more difficult with vibe coding with most of these tools to try and implement an existing interesting design.
It's hard to sort of import screens and do all that.
It's actually easier to sort of define it.
And you can work with the generative AI to sort of get the look and feel right and all that kind of stuff and then hand it off to them.
And they can make sure it's sort of in compliance with any design system or anything else that you're using.
Thank you for refielding that, Drew.
Sorry, Katie, to interject there.
Did you want to get back to some of these cases?
I know you got a couple more up your sleeve.
Michael, do you want to share that we have one use case from someone within our company that created this layoff impact analyzer?
Michael, I don't know if you wanted to share that as a great example.
Definitely. So this is an awesome example that one of our colleagues used on their site where they are working for an HR publication and wanted to build a tool that folks could use to analyze the impact of a layoff if they were planning one.
And the way he's done this is he's actually coded it so that folks who want to use this have to fill out a survey ahead of time.
That way, he's collecting data on people that are using it, which is something that he wanted to do for his own purposes.
So once he completed that survey, then the app brings you into this calculator.
And so there are a few examples that he's got built into it.
So if you're at a manufacturing company and you're looking to lay off 200 employees, then you can select this example just to kind of see how it works.
but essentially you put in all these different details and talk about like okay you know how much knowledge these people have how much how much time would it take to to retrain somebody for this role and then you can calculate the impact of that layoff and it'll tell you exactly what kind of effect this will have so this would be a great tool for folks who are working in hr who are planning a layoff and he's just giving this out for free for folks who want to play it around with it and give them feedback but that's a one example that we have just from from someone on our team the second example
i could share which is uh the polling tool that we were just using i just coded it on myself i have no experience coding or very limited anyway and so i built out this poll so that or this poll app basically so that we could take voting from the live audience and display the results instead of having to pay for something that did it because it's a lot of times what happens is apps will have that as a feature but you got to pay into it and they you're paying for all these other features that you're not really using I only really cared about the pool and so I built this all so that I could create
my own pools I can give it whatever name I want add as many options as they want I can preview before it goes live and then I can either launch them from here or turn them off get rid of them etc and then this is how they're displayed on screen so you folks are voting on the app that I created I'm not collecting any data from you don't worry it just lives in here and yeah so that's where we we saw those results there.
And that was something that I just threw together.
I mean, I was actually working on it 30 minutes before this call, but in total, it probably took me one to two hours just to put this together and give it some branding that I thought looked kind of nice, but I'm also not a designer, so don't take tips from me.
So yeah, I mean, we've talked about the upsides here.
Of course, you know, there's some people who are playing around in this and thinking that they are just never going to need anybody technical ever again.
But there's this one example of this guy, Leo Jr. His post went viral on X, but he's the founder of EnrichLead, which is a tool that collects IP addresses and uses an LLM to generate sales leads.
So he built the entire app using Cursor.
And he said very proudly, like zero handwritten code, AI is the builder.
You can whine about it or you can start building just like a lot of bravado and no humbleness.
And so of course, the internet chose violence.
and within 48 hours, the hackers took over and his subscriptions were bypassed and his costs skyrocketed and the LLM started hallucinating lead data out of thin air.
So Leo had to post like an SOS to Twitter and say, hey, I'm under attack, random things are happening.
I'm not technical. So this is taking me longer than usual to figure out.
And so now he's learning how to code the hard way.
So of course, you know, again, just the the lesson that you always need a human in the loop and it's fun to play around with as a non -technical person but you always need a technical person reviewing the code actually michael did you want to kind of give people like a quick rundown of like what that learning curve was like for you when you very first started playing around with the tools sure well i mean like i said i have very limited not like coding knowledge and so this was something that i feel like I see this sometimes where people will say something like, oh, you know, I'm an ideas person.
I've never actually built that something before.
And that's 100 % the camp that I fall into.
Because I'm often thinking about, you know, different ways that I can try to cut down on internal process or do things without having to like pay for third party apps, but actually building it out is difficult.
So in response to Graham there, he was asking what the learning curve is like in practice, and the tool that we're going to be using today lovable.
And it's It's going to be similar across the other apps that are out there as well.
Honestly, the learning curve is really gradual, really low because there's, I mean, like you're going to see, it's just text prompting.
So you outline exactly what it is that you'd like to see, like your goal for building the app, what the kind of outcomes you want to see.
And then it'll spit out some examples of what it might build for you.
But you can also provide additional details as well.
So if you've got something that you're basing it off of, For example, for this one, I said, I want it to look like something like Slido .com, which if you're familiar with Slido, is a polling app.
And so it can use examples from the real world to base those off of.
And then you can put your own branding and any other requirements that you need the app to do when you're putting it in.
Once it's built out the initial iteration, it's also...
That's not the end of it.
You can keep chatting with it.
There's a chat mode, so you can ask it questions before it actually changes the code or builds anything in addition to that.
What I found worked for me too is when things got a little bit beyond my knowledge, I actually went to, I took some of the things that lovable would tell me to, it was doing, and I'd take that, I'd copy the chat GPT, and I'd say, explain this to me like I'm five.
And so it would dumb it down for somebody like me who doesn't understand all the technicalities and explained it really, really thoroughly.
So, yeah, it was a really smooth process and made it really easy to try building something like this.
That is so cool. And I hope that's very encouraging for those of us, including myself, who are starting like really from scratch. I did want to bring up a question here from Tal.
We're going to pitch this one to Drew.
So Tal asks, what would you suggest is a good workflow for existing product companies?
I'm a PM working at a startup.
We have a design system and a working product with users.
How do you think I can use vibe coding for specific features or ideas?
And when would it go back to design or will it skip the design and go straight to dev?
So I think like this whole workflow is 100 % work in progress.
Now, there are no best practices yet.
It's still kind of the wild west in terms of putting all this stuff together.
But the way I would do it if I were at a company is I would skip design, but I would coordinate with the designer.
So I would do like, and I'll show you my vibe PRD. I would put something together that sort of talks about the screens and the elements.
And I would make sure to get buy -in from the designers.
And they can even be collaborators on this too.
So remember, this isn't something we need to do in silo.
We can all be looking at the same project and working on it together.
And then what I would do is I would create it.
There's no magical way that I've heard of, at least with Lovable, to integrate design systems. Some of the other tools like Cursor is actually a lower level tool for this because you can plug in the chats and everything, but you're really working in the code in an integrated development environment.
environment and it often requires like running command line things so it's a little more technical for totally non -technical people but it does allow you for a little more code integration and interaction so that might be a better tool for this use case but if i were doing it here it will actually do a two -way sync to github which i'll try and show if we have time today so you could do an iteration of a screen you could post it to github and then your devs could pull it it down they could apply all their components and design systems and push it back up and then when you went back in all that stuff
you should be able to see it and it should hopefully ideally work great wicked this question is from donald for drew what's your experience around vibe coding for something that is more cloney and in brackets yet another task manager versus something that is more unique like a sonification of google trends data so like i guess in other words vibe coding coding for something that is more like a version of something that already exists in multitude versus something that's a completely unheard of, never really been done before idea?
That's a great question.
So my experience in general with prototyping tools and vibe coding tools is that anything that exists is fairly straightforward. It can add them, it understands, Dan's, you know, like our sort of default example today is a travel app.
It can do travel apps all day long.
But when you get into something like sonification of Google Trends data, it's going to be more of a battle.
And I would add, if you get into anything that's outside of, that's going to require like very custom sort of visualization tools, other than your standard sort of UI elements with dropdowns and buttons and things like that, you're going to struggle go with these kinds of tools, at least with lovable.
And where we are today, there may be other tools that will sort of make this easier.
But right now, those are kind of things you're going to need to pull dabs in and work with if you're doing something crazy and really out of the norm.
All right, well, that brings us to time.
I want to give a huge thank you to Katie for being part of this.
And of course, to Drew for being such an amazing resource for volunteering your your time, and expertise.
Thanks for listening in.
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