If you’ve heard the buzz about Vibe Coding but aren’t quite sure what’s real and what’s hype, this episode is your shortcut to clarity. Recorded live at our hands-on Vibe Coding Workshop, this 30-minute seminar with Drew Falkman (Principal at Moves The Needle) unpacks what Vibe Coding actually is, where it fits in the product lifecycle, and how non-technical folks are already using it to ship tools and prototypes—without writing a line of code.
Joined by co-host Katie Sanders, Hannah leads a myth-busting session that tackles common misconceptions (spoiler: engineers aren’t going anywhere), showcases real-world use cases from Reddit and their own team, and offers tactical advice for PMs who want to explore this fast-evolving space responsibly.
Resources from this episode:
- Subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter
- Connect with Drew on LinkedIn
- Check out Moves The Needle
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Hannah Clark (00:00):
All right, guys.
Episode disclaimer—ifyou're already an expert
Vibe coder, this episodemight not be for you.
But if you've heard of VibeCoding and you wanna know
the facts versus the myths,and you're curious about how
you can use the technology toadvance your own objectives,
you are gonna love this.
If you haven't been followingour newsletters, as in the
ones you can subscribe to attheproductmanager.com/subscribe,
(00:21):
I haven't been able to shutup about the awesome hands-on
Vibe Coding Workshop we helda few weeks back, Moves The
Needle Principal, Drew Falkman.
This episode of theProduct Manager Podcast
is actually a recording ofthe 30-minute seminar we
did before jumping into ourlive prototyping session.
You'll hear a breakdown ofwhat vibe coding is and isn't,
inspiring use cases for thetech, and tool recommendations
(00:41):
to start playing and discoveringuse cases of your own.
Let's jump in.
Oh, by the way, wehold conversations
like this every week.
So if this sounds interestingto you, why not subscribe?
Okay, now let's jump in.
I'm Hannah Clark.
If you don't know me, I'mthe Executive Editor for The
Product Manager and the hostof The Product Manager podcast.
And I've got my co-host, Katie.
Katie Sanders (01:03):
Hi everybody, I'm Katie Sanders.
I'm Executive Editorat The CTO Club.
Maybe also from The QA Lead.
There's some people thatwe merged those sites.
So I'm excited.
This is my first workshopand really excited to be
doing this with Hannah,'cause there's a lot of blend
between product and CTOs.
So yeah, I'm excited toget to know everybody.
Welcome!
Hannah Clark (01:23):
I'm very excited to be working
with Katie on this.
If you don't follow heron LinkedIn yet, Katie
Sanders, she's such a badass.
She's got great content, so Ireally am excited for you guys
to get to know each other.
I'd love to introduce ourfeatured speaker as well.
We've got Drew Falkman here.
Drew is a product leader,an advisor, an educator
focused on pre-seed toseed product strategy.
He's streamlined early teams.
He's optimized forproduct to market fit.
(01:45):
He's done it all.
He's a great friendof the publication.
He's worked with us tons.
And he's worked with me alot, which tells you that
he's a very patient man.
So you guys are ingood hands today.
And he also experienceshe's got a lot of
experience in web, mobile,blockchain, and AI products.
So we have anamazing expert here.
Drew, do you want to sayhello to the nice people?
Drew Falkman (02:03):
Hey everyone, super excited to be here.
This is gonna be fun.
Hannah Clark (02:06):
So we're gonna start by some myth busting
and I'll kick us off with thefirst question and then my
lovely co-host, Katie, we'llgo through some myths and
have Drew debunk them for us.
So we'll start bysetting some context.
Seems like everybody is talkingabout vibe coding and it comes
up in every LinkedIn post rightnow, including a lot of my own.
And people either seem to bevery excited by it or very
scared or very confused.
(02:28):
So let's talk about whyVibe coding is so popular.
Why is it soimportant right now?
Let's get into themyth around that.
Katie Sanders (02:34):
All right, so first myth, vibe, coding
is replacing engineers.
Obviously there's a lotof, in general, AI is
replacing everyone's job.
That's what it's saying.
I would say that that's amyth and that maybe it's
changing the engineer's joband it is creating app ready
code, but it's certainlynot completely replacing
the job of an engineer.
As always, with ai, we wannakeep a human in the loop,
(02:55):
and so I would say nothing'sgonna get shipped without
human eyeballs, and so Ithink we can bust that myth.
Hannah Clark (03:02):
Drew, did you have anything to add to that?
Drew Falkman (03:03):
Yeah, I would say it's something to be
aware of and be cognitiveof as an engineer that's
coming down the pike.
Just could speedup your process.
And as a designer and productmanager and non-technical
founder, you guys now havethe ability to create MVPs and
create and validate prototypesand do things, and then hand
it off to the engineers.
(03:25):
When you wanna get intoproduction level code,
generally speaking, pass an MVP.
In this day and age, certainlyyou need to be doing code
reviews and going over andmaking sure that everything
is tightened up, especially.
If there's any sort ofcompliance issues or anything
you need to be aware of.
Hannah Clark (03:42):
We'll move on to myth number two.
So some people say thevibe coding is a world
outside of the dev cycle.
So in other words, if youbuild something in a vibe
coding app, that you stilllike that it's not really
usable and that you have torebuild it completely from
the ground up with a developerwho's hard coding whole thing.
Drew, is this really the case?
Drew Falkman (04:00):
The tools have evolved so much and it's one
of those things where it'sliterally changing every day.
Claude just released a newsort of iteration of their
code generation within the lastmonth or so, and it's miles
better than it was before.
So it's continually improving.
It does just like allgenerative AI stuff.
(04:21):
It can hallucinate,it can do goofy stuff.
It can do thingsthat are unexpected.
So as part of the cycleit can work into the cycle
and you can actually createthese sort of code pieces.
Hand them off to engineers,but you really need to be
conscious that they're going toprobably need some reworking.
(04:42):
You might need to reusesome components, and I think
some engineers might besomewhat surprised at how
good the code actually is.
Hannah Clark (04:49):
Okay.
Another myth that I've hearda lot is that you don't need
a PRD or a product strategyin order to vibe code a tool.
Drew, Katie, thoughts on that?
Drew Falkman (04:57):
Look, you always need to think.
I think what happens issometimes people think
if I'm vibe coding, I canjust jump in, open it up
and have an app tomorrow.
And just like anythingelse, if you don't put any
forethought into it, it's notgoing to be what you want.
You wanna think aboutwho your audience is, who
your target market is.
You want to think about whatyour value proposition is.
(05:18):
You want to think about whatthe core features and flows
in the app are going to be.
And so it's reallyworth your time to.
Put together something.
Now, the beauty of it isyou don't have to create
a five to 10 page PRD thatdefines the tech that's gonna
be used, and that diagramsall the flows and all that.
You don't have tothink about that.
(05:39):
You just wanna outline what yourvision is, what it is you're
building, and in fact, I'vecome up with a little vibe,
PRD, and that's like one totwo pages, and it's just for
you and anyone else who youmight be collaborating with so
that you're on the same pageand that you can come at it
with an organized approach.
And that your code iscleaner in the long run.
Hannah Clark (05:58):
Good to know.
We'll move on to the nextmyth here about highly
regulated industries.
Now, Katie represents theCTO Club, so did you wanna
take the myth on Katie?
Katie Sanders (06:08):
Yeah, I think one other one I
wanted to touch on is.
That this is new andtell you like we've been
vibe coding for years.
We didn't call it that untilrecently, but, copy pasting
from GitHub or Reddit or HackerNews, wherever, like great
engineers, they solve problems.
They search and patternmatch and adapt and build.
So I think this prompt isjust the next evolution of
(06:28):
what's always been there.
And then, Hannah, what was theother one you wanted to bust?
Hannah Clark (06:33):
Just that if you're in a highly
regulated industry thatyou can't vibe code.
Oh it's not secure.
Katie Sanders (06:37):
Yeah.
Like obviously when we thinkabout like healthcare or
finance, those are highlyregulated industries.
So it's just with any otherindustry you wanna make sure
that you're HIPAA compliantand all of those things.
I know that LLMscan sometimes pull.
Yeah.
So just considercompliance issues.
Really in the industry.
But I think that there'sa little bit of an extra
guardrail when you're thinkingabout healthcare or finance
(07:00):
or something like that.
Hannah Clark (07:01):
Yeah, I think it's kinda like a lot of different
development processes where youstill, the vibe coding tools
don't replace your personnel.
They're just like acompliment to accelerate
the development cycle.
But yeah, like a good rigorouscode review process, it's
probably more essentialthan ever now that we're
outsourcing some of that work.
All right.
Let's talk a little bitabout some use cases.
It'll be fun to explorea few different ways that
(07:22):
people are using vibe codingeffectively right now.
Katie will run this sectionof the show here and go
through some of the usecases that were pretty cool.
Katie Sanders (07:31):
I actually, a lot of these I pulled
from Reddit when Vibe Codingfirst started happening.
Like I wanted to see realworld 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 thisand one of the things we talked
about was this person who built,I think it was like a soccer,
(07:52):
it was like a niche soccergame organizer, just like his,
a personal in interest hobby.
He was not a developer, buthe understood how full Stack
apps worked, and he's alwayshad to hire developers to
bring his ideas to life.
But as he started playingaround with lovable and cursor
and all these other things.
He built this niche soccergame app and it was just help
his to organize his weeklygames and he ended up shipping
(08:16):
this and I think successfully.
Yeah, shipped a hundred lineAI generated app profitably.
Within weeks, I thinkwas bringing in something
like, was it Michael?
Was it like $700 a weekor something like that.
Another example we found wasthis one called Work aid,
which would, it's a gamifiedtask management powered by ai.
(08:37):
So like revolutionizingyour to-do list with apps to
make work feel like a game.
So those were like a coupleof successful examples
that I pulled from Redditand we can link you guys
to that Reddit post.
There were a few more examplesof that and I think, a lot
of people are just gonna playaround with this, but there are
some people who are gonna bereally successful with this,
which is really cool to see.
Hannah Clark (08:57):
Yeah that's a very cool example.
I didn't wanna just interjectquickly 'cause we have a very
good question from Katya.
Katya says, I was wondering,as a PM would I even have to
still create wire frames andmockups for the front end?
I could just create it with vibecoding and then the devs can
use my front end as a startingpoint for their own development.
Drew Falkman (09:14):
Yes, 100%.
In fact, I would say thatit would be more difficult
with Vibe coding with mostof these tools to try and
implement an existing design.
It's hard to importscreens and do all that.
It's actually easier to defineit and you can work with the
generative AI to get the lookand feel right and all that
kind of stuff, and then handit off to them and they can
(09:35):
make sure it's in compliancewith any design system or
anything else that you're using.
Hannah Clark (09:40):
Thank you for for fielding that Drew.
Sorry Katie, to,to interject there.
Did you wanna get backto some of the use cases?
I know you got a couplemore up your sleeve.
Katie Sanders (09:46):
Michael, do you wanna share that we have
one like use case from someonewithin our company, they created
this layoff impact analyzer.
Michael, I dunno if youwanted to share that
as a great example.
Michael Mordak (09:59):
Definitely.
So this is a, an awesomeexample that one of our
colleagues used on their sitewhere they are working for an
HR publication and wanted tobuild a tool that folks could
use to analyze the impact of alayoff if they were planning on.
And the way he's done this ishe's actually coded it so that,
or bot coded it so that folkswho wanna use this have to fill
(10:20):
out a survey ahead of time.
That way he's collecting data onpeople that are using it, which
is something that he wantedto do for his own purposes.
So once he completed thatsurvey, then the app brings
you into this calculator.
And so there are a few examplesthat he's got built into it.
So if you're, at a manufacturingcompany and you're looking to
lay off 200 employees, thenyou can select this example
(10:40):
just to see how it works.
But essentially you put inall these different details
and talk about okay, how muchknowledge do these people have?
How much time would it take toretrain somebody for this role?
And then you can calculatethe impact of that layoff and
it'll tell you exactly whatkind of effect this will have.
So this would be a great toolfor folks who are working
in HR who are planning alayoff and he's just given
(11:02):
it to, for free, for folkswho wanna play it around with
it and give them feedback.
But that's one examplethat we have just from
someone on our team.
The second example I couldshare, which is the polling
tool that we were just using,I just coded it on myself.
I have no experience codingor very limited anyway.
And so I built out this poolso that, or this pool's app
basically, so that we could.
(11:22):
Take voting from the liveaudience and display the
results instead of having topay for something that did it.
Because it's, a lot of timeswhat happens is apps will
have that as a feature,but you gotta pay into it
and they, you're paying forall the other features that
you're not really using.
I only really care aboutthe pool, and so I built
this all so that I couldcreate my own pools.
I can give it whatevername I want, add as many
options as they want.
(11:43):
I can preview it before itgoes live, and then I can
either launch them fromhere or turn them off, get
rid of them, et cetera.
And then this is howthey're displayed on screen.
So you folks are votingon the app that I created.
I'm not collectingany data from you.
Don't worry.
It just lives in here.
And yeah, so that's wherewe saw those results there.
And that was somethingthat I just threw together.
(12:04):
I was actually working on it30 minutes before this call,
but in total it probably tookme, one to one to two hours
just to put this togetherand give it some branding
that I thought looked nice.
But I'm also not a designer,so don't take tips from me.
Katie Sanders (12:16):
Yeah, I mean we, we've talked
about the upsides here.
Of course, there's some peoplewho are playing around in
this and thinking that theyare just never gonna need
anybody technical ever again.
But there's this one exampleof this guy, Leo Junior.
His post went viral on X, buthe's the founder of Enrich
Lead, which is a tool thatcollects IP addresses and uses
(12:38):
an LLM to generate sales leads.
So he built the entire appusing Cursor and he said very
proudly, like zero handwrittencode AI is, the builder.
You can whine about itor you can start building
just like a lot ofbravado and no humbleness.
And so of course the internetchose violence and within 48
hours, the hackers took over andhis subscriptions were bypassed
(13:01):
and his cost skyrocketed.
And the LLM startedhallucinating lead
data out of thin air.
So Leo had to post likean SOS to Twitter and say,
Hey, I'm under attack.
Random things are happening.
I'm not technical, sothis is taking me longer
than usual to figure out.
And so now he's learninghow to code the hard way.
So of course, again, just thelesson that you always need
(13:24):
a human in the loop and it'sfun to play around with as
a non-technical person, butyou always need a technical
person reviewing the code.
Hannah Clark (13:33):
Actually, Michael, did you wanna give people like
a quick rundown of what thatlearning curve was like for
you when you very first startedplaying around with the tools?
Michael Mordak (13:41):
Sure.
I, like I said, I have verylimited know, like coding
knowledge, and so this issomething that I feel like,
I see this sometimes wherepeople will say something
like, oh, I'm an ideas person.
I've never actually builtthat something before and
that's a hundred percentthe camp that I fall into
because I'm often thinkingabout, different ways that.
I could try to cut down oninternal process or do things
(14:02):
without having to like, pay forthird party apps, but actually
building it out is difficult.
So in response to Grand there,he was asking what the learning
curve is like in practiceand the tool that we're
gonna be using today lovable.
And it's gonna be similaracross the other apps that
are out there as well.
It's honestly the learningcurve is really gradual.
It was really low becausethere's, there like you see
(14:22):
it's just text prompting.
So you out outline exactlywhat it is that you'd like
to see, like the things thatyour goal for building the
app would, what the kindof outcomes you wanna see.
And then it'll spit outsome examples of what
it might build for you.
But you can also provideadditional details as well.
So if you've got something thatyou're basing it off of, like
for example, for this one, Isaid I want to, I wanted to
(14:43):
look something like slido.com,which if you're familiar
with Slido, is a polling app.
And so it can use examplesfrom the real world to base
those off of, and then youcan input your own branding.
Any other requirementsthat you need the app to do
when you're putting it in?
Once it's built out, theinitial iteration, it's also
that's not the end of it.
You can keep chatting with it.
(15:04):
There's a chat mode so youcan ask it questions before
it actually changes thecode or builds anything.
In addition to that, whatI found worked for me too
is when things got a littlebit beyond my knowledge,
I actually went to, I tooksome of the things that.
Lovable would tell me thatI was doing, and I'd take
that, I'd copy the chatGBT and I'd say, explain
this to me like, I'm five.
(15:24):
And so it would dumb it downfor somebody like me who
doesn't understand all thetechnicalities and explained
it really thoroughly.
So yeah, it was reallysmooth process and I made
it really easy to trybuilding something like this.
Hannah Clark (15:35):
That is so cool.
And I hope that's veryencouraging for those
of us, including myself,who are starting like
really from scratch.
I did want to bring up aquestion here from Tal.
We're gonna pitchthis one to Drew.
So Tal asks, what would yousuggest is a good workflow for
existing product companies?
I'm a PM working at a startup.
We have a design system anda working product with users.
Why do you think I canuse Vibe coding for
(15:55):
specific features or ideas?
And when would it go back todesign or will it skip the
design and go straight to Dev?
Drew Falkman (16:00):
So I think this whole workflow is 100%
work in progress right now.
There are no best practices yet.
It's still the wild westin terms of putting all
this stuff together.
But the way I would do itif I were at a company is I
would skip design, but I wouldcoordinate with the designer.
So I would do and I'll showyou my vibe, PRD, I would
(16:22):
put something togetherthat sort of talks about
the screens and elements.
Now, make sure to getbuy-in from the designers.
They can even becollaborators on this too.
So remember, this isn'tsomething we need to do in silo.
We can all be lookingat the same project and
working on it together.
And then what I woulddo is I would create it.
There's no like magicalway that I've heard of,
(16:44):
at least with lovable tointegrate design systems.
Some of the other tools likeCursor is actually a lower
level tool for this becauseyou can plug in the chats
and everything, but you'rereally working in the code.
In like an integrateddevelopment environment,
and it often requires likerunning command line thing.
So it's a little more technicalfor totally non-technical
(17:05):
people, but it does allowyou for a little more code
integration and interaction.
So that might be a bettertool for this use case.
But if I were doing it here,it will actually do a two-way
sync to GitHub, which I'll tryand show if we have time today.
So you could do aniteration of a screen, you
could post it to GitHub.
And then your devscould pull it down.
(17:26):
They could apply all oftheir components and design
systems and push it back up.
And then when you went back inall that stuff, you should be
able to see it and it shouldhopefully, ideally work great.
Hannah Clark (17:38):
Wicked.
This question isfrom Donald for Drew.
What's your experience aroundvibe coding for something that
is more cloney in bracketsvia another task manager
versus something that is moreunique, like a sonification
of Google Trends data?
So in other words, vibe codingfor something that is more like
a version of something thatalready exists in multitude
versus something that's acompletely unheard of, never
(18:00):
really been done before idea.
Drew Falkman (18:02):
That's a great question.
So my experience in generalwith prototyping tools and
vibe coding tools is thatanything that exists is
fairly straightforward.
It can add them, it understands.
Like our sort of defaultexample today is a travel app.
It can do travel apps all daylong, but when you get into
(18:25):
something like Sonificationof Google Trends data, it's
going to be more of a battle.
And I would add, if you getinto anything that's outside
of, that's going to requirelike very custom sort of
visualization tools otherthan your standard sort of UI
elements with dropdowns andbuttons and things like that.
(18:45):
You're gonna struggle with thesekind of tools, at least with
lovable and where we are today.
There may be other tools thatwill make this easier, but
right now those are thingsyou're gonna need to pull
dabs in and work with ifyou're doing something crazy
and really out of the norm.
Hannah Clark (19:01):
All right.
That brings us to time.
I wanna give a huge thank youto Katie for being part of
this, and of course to Drewfor being such an amazing
resource for volunteeringyour time and expertise.
Thanks for listening in.
For more great insights,how-to guides and tool reviews,
subscribe to our newsletter attheproductmanager.com/subscribe.
(19:23):
You can hear more conversationslike this by subscribing to
The Product Manager whereveryou get your podcasts.
All right, guys.
Episode disclaimer—ifyou're already an expert
Vibe coder, this episodemight not be for you.
But if you've heard of VibeCoding and you wanna know
the facts versus the myths,and you're curious about how
you can use the technology toadvance your own objectives,
you are gonna love this.
If you haven't been followingour newsletters, as in the
ones you can subscribe to attheproductmanager.com/subscribe,
(00:21):
I haven't been able to shutup about the awesome hands-on
Vibe Coding Workshop we helda few weeks back, Moves The
Needle Principal, Drew Falkman.
This episode of theProduct Manager Podcast
is actually a recording ofthe 30-minute seminar we
did before jumping into ourlive prototyping session.
You'll hear a breakdown ofwhat vibe coding is and isn't,
inspiring use cases for thetech, and tool recommendations
(00:41):
to start playing and discoveringuse cases of your own.
Let's jump in.
Oh, by the way, wehold conversations
like this every week.
So if this sounds interestingto you, why not subscribe?
Okay, now let's jump in.
I'm Hannah Clark.
If you don't know me, I'mthe Executive Editor for The
Product Manager and the hostof The Product Manager podcast.
And I've got my co-host, Katie.
Katie Sanders (01:03):
Hi everybody, I'm Katie Sanders.
I'm Executive Editorat The CTO Club.
Maybe also from The QA Lead.
There's some people thatwe merged those sites.
So I'm excited.
This is my first workshopand really excited to be
doing this with Hannah,'cause there's a lot of blend
between product and CTOs.
So yeah, I'm excited toget to know everybody.
Welcome!
Hannah Clark (01:23):
I'm very excited to be working
with Katie on this.
If you don't follow heron LinkedIn yet, Katie
Sanders, she's such a badass.
She's got great content, so Ireally am excited for you guys
to get to know each other.
I'd love to introduce ourfeatured speaker as well.
We've got Drew Falkman here.
Drew is a product leader,an advisor, an educator
focused on pre-seed toseed product strategy.
He's streamlined early teams.
He's optimized forproduct to market fit.
(01:45):
He's done it all.
He's a great friendof the publication.
He's worked with us tons.
And he's worked with me alot, which tells you that
he's a very patient man.
So you guys are ingood hands today.
And he also experienceshe's got a lot of
experience in web, mobile,blockchain, and AI products.
So we have anamazing expert here.
Drew, do you want to sayhello to the nice people?
Drew Falkman (02:03):
Hey everyone, super excited to be here.
This is gonna be fun.
Hannah Clark (02:06):
So we're gonna start by some myth busting
and I'll kick us off with thefirst question and then my
lovely co-host, Katie, we'llgo through some myths and
have Drew debunk them for us.
So we'll start bysetting some context.
Seems like everybody is talkingabout vibe coding and it comes
up in every LinkedIn post rightnow, including a lot of my own.
And people either seem to bevery excited by it or very
scared or very confused.
(02:28):
So let's talk about whyVibe coding is so popular.
Why is it soimportant right now?
Let's get into themyth around that.
Katie Sanders (02:34):
All right, so first myth, vibe, coding
is replacing engineers.
Obviously there's a lotof, in general, AI is
replacing everyone's job.
That's what it's saying.
I would say that that's amyth and that maybe it's
changing the engineer's joband it is creating app ready
code, but it's certainlynot completely replacing
the job of an engineer.
As always, with ai, we wannakeep a human in the loop,
(02:55):
and so I would say nothing'sgonna get shipped without
human eyeballs, and so Ithink we can bust that myth.
Hannah Clark (03:02):
Drew, did you have anything to add to that?
Drew Falkman (03:03):
Yeah, I would say it's something to be
aware of and be cognitiveof as an engineer that's
coming down the pike.
Just could speedup your process.
And as a designer and productmanager and non-technical
founder, you guys now havethe ability to create MVPs and
create and validate prototypesand do things, and then hand
it off to the engineers.
(03:25):
When you wanna get intoproduction level code,
generally speaking, pass an MVP.
In this day and age, certainlyyou need to be doing code
reviews and going over andmaking sure that everything
is tightened up, especially.
If there's any sort ofcompliance issues or anything
you need to be aware of.
Hannah Clark (03:42):
We'll move on to myth number two.
So some people say thevibe coding is a world
outside of the dev cycle.
So in other words, if youbuild something in a vibe
coding app, that you stilllike that it's not really
usable and that you have torebuild it completely from
the ground up with a developerwho's hard coding whole thing.
Drew, is this really the case?
Drew Falkman (04:00):
The tools have evolved so much and it's one
of those things where it'sliterally changing every day.
Claude just released a newsort of iteration of their
code generation within the lastmonth or so, and it's miles
better than it was before.
So it's continually improving.
It does just like allgenerative AI stuff.
(04:21):
It can hallucinate,it can do goofy stuff.
It can do thingsthat are unexpected.
So as part of the cycleit can work into the cycle
and you can actually createthese sort of code pieces.
Hand them off to engineers,but you really need to be
conscious that they're going toprobably need some reworking.
(04:42):
You might need to reusesome components, and I think
some engineers might besomewhat surprised at how
good the code actually is.
Hannah Clark (04:49):
Okay.
Another myth that I've hearda lot is that you don't need
a PRD or a product strategyin order to vibe code a tool.
Drew, Katie, thoughts on that?
Drew Falkman (04:57):
Look, you always need to think.
I think what happens issometimes people think
if I'm vibe coding, I canjust jump in, open it up
and have an app tomorrow.
And just like anythingelse, if you don't put any
forethought into it, it's notgoing to be what you want.
You wanna think aboutwho your audience is, who
your target market is.
You want to think about whatyour value proposition is.
(05:18):
You want to think about whatthe core features and flows
in the app are going to be.
And so it's reallyworth your time to.
Put together something.
Now, the beauty of it isyou don't have to create
a five to 10 page PRD thatdefines the tech that's gonna
be used, and that diagramsall the flows and all that.
You don't have tothink about that.
(05:39):
You just wanna outline what yourvision is, what it is you're
building, and in fact, I'vecome up with a little vibe,
PRD, and that's like one totwo pages, and it's just for
you and anyone else who youmight be collaborating with so
that you're on the same pageand that you can come at it
with an organized approach.
And that your code iscleaner in the long run.
Hannah Clark (05:58):
Good to know.
We'll move on to the nextmyth here about highly
regulated industries.
Now, Katie represents theCTO Club, so did you wanna
take the myth on Katie?
Katie Sanders (06:08):
Yeah, I think one other one I
wanted to touch on is.
That this is new andtell you like we've been
vibe coding for years.
We didn't call it that untilrecently, but, copy pasting
from GitHub or Reddit or HackerNews, wherever, like great
engineers, they solve problems.
They search and patternmatch and adapt and build.
So I think this prompt isjust the next evolution of
(06:28):
what's always been there.
And then, Hannah, what was theother one you wanted to bust?
Hannah Clark (06:33):
Just that if you're in a highly
regulated industry thatyou can't vibe code.
Oh it's not secure.
Katie Sanders (06:37):
Yeah.
Like obviously when we thinkabout like healthcare or
finance, those are highlyregulated industries.
So it's just with any otherindustry you wanna make sure
that you're HIPAA compliantand all of those things.
I know that LLMscan sometimes pull.
Yeah.
So just considercompliance issues.
Really in the industry.
But I think that there'sa little bit of an extra
guardrail when you're thinkingabout healthcare or finance
(07:00):
or something like that.
Hannah Clark (07:01):
Yeah, I think it's kinda like a lot of different
development processes where youstill, the vibe coding tools
don't replace your personnel.
They're just like acompliment to accelerate
the development cycle.
But yeah, like a good rigorouscode review process, it's
probably more essentialthan ever now that we're
outsourcing some of that work.
All right.
Let's talk a little bitabout some use cases.
It'll be fun to explorea few different ways that
(07:22):
people are using vibe codingeffectively right now.
Katie will run this sectionof the show here and go
through some of the usecases that were pretty cool.
Katie Sanders (07:31):
I actually, a lot of these I pulled
from Reddit when Vibe Codingfirst started happening.
Like I wanted to see realworld 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 thisand one of the things we talked
about was this person who built,I think it was like a soccer,
(07:52):
it was like a niche soccergame organizer, just like his,
a personal in interest hobby.
He was not a developer, buthe understood how full Stack
apps worked, and he's alwayshad to hire developers to
bring his ideas to life.
But as he started playingaround with lovable and cursor
and all these other things.
He built this niche soccergame app and it was just help
his to organize his weeklygames and he ended up shipping
(08:16):
this and I think successfully.
Yeah, shipped a hundred lineAI generated app profitably.
Within weeks, I thinkwas bringing in something
like, was it Michael?
Was it like $700 a weekor something like that.
Another example we found wasthis one called Work aid,
which would, it's a gamifiedtask management powered by ai.
(08:37):
So like revolutionizingyour to-do list with apps to
make work feel like a game.
So those were like a coupleof successful examples
that I pulled from Redditand we can link you guys
to that Reddit post.
There were a few more examplesof that and I think, a lot
of people are just gonna playaround with this, but there are
some people who are gonna bereally successful with this,
which is really cool to see.
Hannah Clark (08:57):
Yeah that's a very cool example.
I didn't wanna just interjectquickly 'cause we have a very
good question from Katya.
Katya says, I was wondering,as a PM would I even have to
still create wire frames andmockups for the front end?
I could just create it with vibecoding and then the devs can
use my front end as a startingpoint for their own development.
Drew Falkman (09:14):
Yes, 100%.
In fact, I would say thatit would be more difficult
with Vibe coding with mostof these tools to try and
implement an existing design.
It's hard to importscreens and do all that.
It's actually easier to defineit and you can work with the
generative AI to get the lookand feel right and all that
kind of stuff, and then handit off to them and they can
(09:35):
make sure it's in compliancewith any design system or
anything else that you're using.
Hannah Clark (09:40):
Thank you for for fielding that Drew.
Sorry Katie, to,to interject there.
Did you wanna get backto some of the use cases?
I know you got a couplemore up your sleeve.
Katie Sanders (09:46):
Michael, do you wanna share that we have
one like use case from someonewithin our company, they created
this layoff impact analyzer.
Michael, I dunno if youwanted to share that
as a great example.
Michael Mordak (09:59):
Definitely.
So this is a, an awesomeexample that one of our
colleagues used on their sitewhere they are working for an
HR publication and wanted tobuild a tool that folks could
use to analyze the impact of alayoff if they were planning on.
And the way he's done this ishe's actually coded it so that,
or bot coded it so that folkswho wanna use this have to fill
(10:20):
out a survey ahead of time.
That way he's collecting data onpeople that are using it, which
is something that he wantedto do for his own purposes.
So once he completed thatsurvey, then the app brings
you into this calculator.
And so there are a few examplesthat he's got built into it.
So if you're, at a manufacturingcompany and you're looking to
lay off 200 employees, thenyou can select this example
(10:40):
just to see how it works.
But essentially you put inall these different details
and talk about okay, how muchknowledge do these people have?
How much time would it take toretrain somebody for this role?
And then you can calculatethe impact of that layoff and
it'll tell you exactly whatkind of effect this will have.
So this would be a great toolfor folks who are working
in HR who are planning alayoff and he's just given
(11:02):
it to, for free, for folkswho wanna play it around with
it and give them feedback.
But that's one examplethat we have just from
someone on our team.
The second example I couldshare, which is the polling
tool that we were just using,I just coded it on myself.
I have no experience codingor very limited anyway.
And so I built out this poolso that, or this pool's app
basically, so that we could.
(11:22):
Take voting from the liveaudience and display the
results instead of having topay for something that did it.
Because it's, a lot of timeswhat happens is apps will
have that as a feature,but you gotta pay into it
and they, you're paying forall the other features that
you're not really using.
I only really care aboutthe pool, and so I built
this all so that I couldcreate my own pools.
I can give it whatevername I want, add as many
options as they want.
(11:43):
I can preview it before itgoes live, and then I can
either launch them fromhere or turn them off, get
rid of them, et cetera.
And then this is howthey're displayed on screen.
So you folks are votingon the app that I created.
I'm not collectingany data from you.
Don't worry.
It just lives in here.
And yeah, so that's wherewe saw those results there.
And that was somethingthat I just threw together.
(12:04):
I was actually working on it30 minutes before this call,
but in total it probably tookme, one to one to two hours
just to put this togetherand give it some branding
that I thought looked nice.
But I'm also not a designer,so don't take tips from me.
Katie Sanders (12:16):
Yeah, I mean we, we've talked
about the upsides here.
Of course, there's some peoplewho are playing around in
this and thinking that theyare just never gonna need
anybody technical ever again.
But there's this one exampleof this guy, Leo Junior.
His post went viral on X, buthe's the founder of Enrich
Lead, which is a tool thatcollects IP addresses and uses
(12:38):
an LLM to generate sales leads.
So he built the entire appusing Cursor and he said very
proudly, like zero handwrittencode AI is, the builder.
You can whine about itor you can start building
just like a lot ofbravado and no humbleness.
And so of course the internetchose violence and within 48
hours, the hackers took over andhis subscriptions were bypassed
(13:01):
and his cost skyrocketed.
And the LLM startedhallucinating lead
data out of thin air.
So Leo had to post likean SOS to Twitter and say,
Hey, I'm under attack.
Random things are happening.
I'm not technical, sothis is taking me longer
than usual to figure out.
And so now he's learninghow to code the hard way.
So of course, again, just thelesson that you always need
(13:24):
a human in the loop and it'sfun to play around with as
a non-technical person, butyou always need a technical
person reviewing the code.
Hannah Clark (13:33):
Actually, Michael, did you wanna give people like
a quick rundown of what thatlearning curve was like for
you when you very first startedplaying around with the tools?
Michael Mordak (13:41):
Sure.
I, like I said, I have verylimited know, like coding
knowledge, and so this issomething that I feel like,
I see this sometimes wherepeople will say something
like, oh, I'm an ideas person.
I've never actually builtthat something before and
that's a hundred percentthe camp that I fall into
because I'm often thinkingabout, different ways that.
I could try to cut down oninternal process or do things
(14:02):
without having to like, pay forthird party apps, but actually
building it out is difficult.
So in response to Grand there,he was asking what the learning
curve is like in practiceand the tool that we're
gonna be using today lovable.
And it's gonna be similaracross the other apps that
are out there as well.
It's honestly the learningcurve is really gradual.
It was really low becausethere's, there like you see
(14:22):
it's just text prompting.
So you out outline exactlywhat it is that you'd like
to see, like the things thatyour goal for building the
app would, what the kindof outcomes you wanna see.
And then it'll spit outsome examples of what
it might build for you.
But you can also provideadditional details as well.
So if you've got something thatyou're basing it off of, like
for example, for this one, Isaid I want to, I wanted to
(14:43):
look something like slido.com,which if you're familiar
with Slido, is a polling app.
And so it can use examplesfrom the real world to base
those off of, and then youcan input your own branding.
Any other requirementsthat you need the app to do
when you're putting it in?
Once it's built out, theinitial iteration, it's also
that's not the end of it.
You can keep chatting with it.
(15:04):
There's a chat mode so youcan ask it questions before
it actually changes thecode or builds anything.
In addition to that, whatI found worked for me too
is when things got a littlebit beyond my knowledge,
I actually went to, I tooksome of the things that.
Lovable would tell me thatI was doing, and I'd take
that, I'd copy the chatGBT and I'd say, explain
this to me like, I'm five.
(15:24):
And so it would dumb it downfor somebody like me who
doesn't understand all thetechnicalities and explained
it really thoroughly.
So yeah, it was reallysmooth process and I made
it really easy to trybuilding something like this.
Hannah Clark (15:35):
That is so cool.
And I hope that's veryencouraging for those
of us, including myself,who are starting like
really from scratch.
I did want to bring up aquestion here from Tal.
We're gonna pitchthis one to Drew.
So Tal asks, what would yousuggest is a good workflow for
existing product companies?
I'm a PM working at a startup.
We have a design system anda working product with users.
Why do you think I canuse Vibe coding for
(15:55):
specific features or ideas?
And when would it go back todesign or will it skip the
design and go straight to Dev?
Drew Falkman (16:00):
So I think this whole workflow is 100%
work in progress right now.
There are no best practices yet.
It's still the wild westin terms of putting all
this stuff together.
But the way I would do itif I were at a company is I
would skip design, but I wouldcoordinate with the designer.
So I would do and I'll showyou my vibe, PRD, I would
(16:22):
put something togetherthat sort of talks about
the screens and elements.
Now, make sure to getbuy-in from the designers.
They can even becollaborators on this too.
So remember, this isn'tsomething we need to do in silo.
We can all be lookingat the same project and
working on it together.
And then what I woulddo is I would create it.
There's no like magicalway that I've heard of,
(16:44):
at least with lovable tointegrate design systems.
Some of the other tools likeCursor is actually a lower
level tool for this becauseyou can plug in the chats
and everything, but you'rereally working in the code.
In like an integrateddevelopment environment,
and it often requires likerunning command line thing.
So it's a little more technicalfor totally non-technical
(17:05):
people, but it does allowyou for a little more code
integration and interaction.
So that might be a bettertool for this use case.
But if I were doing it here,it will actually do a two-way
sync to GitHub, which I'll tryand show if we have time today.
So you could do aniteration of a screen, you
could post it to GitHub.
And then your devscould pull it down.
(17:26):
They could apply all oftheir components and design
systems and push it back up.
And then when you went back inall that stuff, you should be
able to see it and it shouldhopefully, ideally work great.
Hannah Clark (17:38):
Wicked.
This question isfrom Donald for Drew.
What's your experience aroundvibe coding for something that
is more cloney in bracketsvia another task manager
versus something that is moreunique, like a sonification
of Google Trends data?
So in other words, vibe codingfor something that is more like
a version of something thatalready exists in multitude
versus something that's acompletely unheard of, never
(18:00):
really been done before idea.
Drew Falkman (18:02):
That's a great question.
So my experience in generalwith prototyping tools and
vibe coding tools is thatanything that exists is
fairly straightforward.
It can add them, it understands.
Like our sort of defaultexample today is a travel app.
It can do travel apps all daylong, but when you get into
(18:25):
something like Sonificationof Google Trends data, it's
going to be more of a battle.
And I would add, if you getinto anything that's outside
of, that's going to requirelike very custom sort of
visualization tools otherthan your standard sort of UI
elements with dropdowns andbuttons and things like that.
(18:45):
You're gonna struggle with thesekind of tools, at least with
lovable and where we are today.
There may be other tools thatwill make this easier, but
right now those are thingsyou're gonna need to pull
dabs in and work with ifyou're doing something crazy
and really out of the norm.
Hannah Clark (19:01):
All right.
That brings us to time.
I wanna give a huge thank youto Katie for being part of
this, and of course to Drewfor being such an amazing
resource for volunteeringyour time and expertise.
Thanks for listening in.
For more great insights,how-to guides and tool reviews,
subscribe to our newsletter attheproductmanager.com/subscribe.
(19:23):
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