Getting paid to vibe code: Inside the new AI-era job | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder)

I'm the first official Vibe coding engineer at Lovable.

You're at the top 0.1% elite level of Vibe coding. It's a dream job for so many people.

It became a job by building in public. You don't need a company to hire you. You can hire yourself as a professional vive coder first.

You've never coded. You don't want to look at the code.

Coding is going to be like calligraphy. People like, oh my God, you wrote that code. That's so amazing. It's going to be so rare that it's going to become an art.

These Venn diagrams of engineer design. RPM used to be very separate. Now they're converging.

AI regardless of your background is an ampl. If you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster.

It feels like an emerging core skill is learning clarity in the ask of the AI.

I like to use the Aladdin and the genie analogy. You rub the lamp, a genie comes out. I'll grant you three wishes. The first wishes, I want to be taller. Genie makes me 13ft tall because I was not specific. A I just don't understand what do you mean when you say you know what I mean, so you need to be specific. I'm optimizing 100% of my time today on good judgment, clarity, quality, taste.

Today my guest is Lazar Yovanovitch. Lazar is a professional Vibe coder. He gets paid to vibe code all day and build internal and external products. This conversation is going to blow your mind in so many ways. This is not only a really interesting new career path for people to consider, but if you listen to what Lazar shares, it's also a really important glimpse into where things are heading for tech roles. I found myself thinking more deeply about the future of product management and engineering and design during this chat than I have in a long time. We also spent a bunch of time on Lazar's best advice as an elite vibe coder for getting the most out of AI tools. He's got a bunch of really interesting and useful frameworks I have not heard anyone else share that will immediately level up your success using all the latest AI tools. This conversation is going to expand your mind in so many ways. I cannot wait for you to hear it. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an insider subscriber of my newsletter, you get over 20 incredible products for free for an entire year, including a year free of Lovable and Replid, Bolt, Gamma, Nadam, Linear, Devin, Post Hoc, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper Flow, Perplexity Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chapier, D Mob, IT, and Stripe, Atlas. Head on over to Lenny's newsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Lazar Yovanovitch. After a short word from our sponsors.

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Lazar, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me, man.

Okay, so I had Elena Verna on the podcast. She's head of growth at Lovable. She mentioned that she works with a professional vibe coder. You. I had so many questions. I almost wanted to like go on a tangent with her to try to understand this role. Instead, I asked you to come on the podcast. There's so much I want to talk about. I want to talk about just this career path and just how you got into it, how other people might get into it, where you think this is all going, this whole vibe coding thing. Also, I want to get into what you've learned about it being successful using all these AI tools because this is your job. First, I want to just start with understanding this actual job. Just like, what is it that you do day to day? You're basically being paid a full time job to vibe code.

Incredible.

What are you responsible for? What are you doing day to day?

Well, as you said it like, it's that it's a dream job. Right. I get paid to do what I would have done anyways. Right. It's the best job in the world. I get to use tools like global every day to push projects to production, whether for internal or external use. Those could be ranging anything from like different templates on marketing side, sales side or whatever. Or they can be as deep as like building some internal tools with a lot of integrations and connections and whatnot. Right. So the surface area that I cover is pretty wide across all departments because it's such a flexible role and it complements so many things. Right. It's, it's an ideas role. A lot of people have a lot of great ideas, but they don't know how to build them and, or they just don't have the bandwidth to. And that's where I step in today to make sure that these ideas come to life fast and with quality and security that they should have in order to be available for users in production.

And one thing that's really interesting here is it's both internal and external tools. A lot of companies have someone building a bunch of internal tools using AI. You ship stuff that's actually public and it's like sort of a product level. Products.

Yeah, definitely. Like some of the stuff that I've shipped that are public are like when we launched our Shopify integration, most of the, if not all the templates that users were remixing were built by me. Right. So stuff like that or like the merch store because we wanted to obviously prove the concept that hey, lovable and shopify just works. It's so simple, anybody can do it. I vibe coded our merch store so all the merch, including this shirt that people were buying online, they would have bought it from a store that was built by me. But then again, on the internal side, we want to track a lot of things. Like one of the cool things that we want to build now, for example, feature adoption matrix. If we build a feature, how many people are actually using it, adopting it, like, and that's a pretty custom build. Right. We have a very custom stack, we're building custom features. There's nothing out there that I could just pick off the shelf and build or adopt faster than I would have built it myself. Like at this point I'm at a stage where like, if it takes me an hour or two hours to set up like a big enterprise account somewhere, I'm just going to build it myself faster. So you know, I'm in that position of like build versus buy. I'm, I'm in the build boat, so to speak.

Yeah. And then who do you report to? Are you kind of this rover that helps wherever or you would win a specific team?

I'd say probably closer to the former. Right. I've started in growth. Right. Elena brought me on early on and you know, to, to because she has so many great ideas and like she just needed somebody with the right type of mindset and velocity and ownership to just take them away, build them up, get them into production, whether they're like based on education or anything, go to market or whatever. But then obviously when you're able to ship fast, everybody needs that in an environment that we as a company are now living in, which is where the fastest growing startup in history. So every department needs a lazar now or yesterday. So now I'm like shifting a little bit, I guess into some of the go to market roles and even building some again internal tools for enterprise team. I'm working on some community tools as well right now as we speak. So I'm a little bit all over the place. But I kind of thrive in that environment where I'm given a rough concept, a rough idea and I'm just tasked to bring it to life as soon as possible.

Okay. I'm hoping with this chat we create a lot more lazars and I want to get to the career path, how you got to this and what it takes to actually Become a full time bike coder. But I want to start with, because you do this full time, you're at the top 0.1% elite level of vibe coding. You're doing this full time. They hired you to do this as a job. I'm so curious what you've learned. What are some pro tips that you've developed for being successful with AI tools? Lovable. And also just more broadly, what are maybe two or three things you've learned that help you be really good at this job?

The first understanding that I had very early on, even though just in full transparency before we begin, I don't have a technical background. I never wrote a single line of code in my life. Almost like I've written a couple console logs manually and that's about it, right? So I'm very much lean onto AI assistance.

Let me actually follow that thread because that's such a good point and something that when we were chatting earlier, you pointed out you're feeling is it's actually an advantage to not have a technical background when you get into this space.

Yeah. Yes, I honestly feel that it is. Because people like me don't know that they are not supposed to be building xyz and that's how we actually are able to build it. Let me give you an example. Like six, seven months ago, somebody in our community was like, oh, I wish Lovable can build Chrome extensions, right? And then folks that are not technical were like, well, why is that not possible, right? And then people that are technical start explaining you, oh, well, you know, it's react, it's different stack, it's this. And. And people like me, including myself, we just go in to Lovable and like build me a Chrome extension based on this app. And I was able to do that with Lovable. There were people that were able to build desktop applications on Lovable. Again, something that shouldn't be possible, it simply is, right? Our community manager, Whitney, at one point she was like building this presentation deck for something. She's like, would it be cool if this was a video? Right? And then she just prompted her way into building a generating an actual video inside Lovable before that was available. Now that's a feature. Now you can prompt Lovable to do it. But back in the day when she did it, even I thought it was impossible. I never tried it. So I think that's the advantage that we have over people that are technical. We're just coming to this completely unbiased and very positively delusional, which I think you have to have. When Working with AI tools, you have to come with this delusion that absolutely everything is possible until proven wrong. And that's just the pursuit that I have in my mind that is helped me, among other things, that we will chat today. I think to excel in this role that I have at Lolloma, two of.

The I think concerns, maybe traps people that don't have a technical background fall to in theory is one is if you get blocked, it's not obvious how to solve a problem. And two is just, are you building like this, like teetering slop that will collapse someday? Because you don't know, you know, system architecture, you don't know if this is going to scale all the sorts of things. So coming back to what you've learned about how to be successful and build successful products, talk us through just things you've done and things you've learned for how to avoid those sort of things and what you do when you get stuck is one example.

I'm happy that you mentioned like those, those limitations. I have some other ones that I want to bring in, but let's address this one first. Which is the most important one and that is you have to be self aware. Right. I didn't come into this. Yes, I am delusional, as I mentioned, in the sense that I just don't want to accept something's not possible. But I'm also well aware that I need to be better in order for it to become a reality from my own point of view, in my own sake. So I understood very early that coding is not the problem that we're solving for here, that the problem we're solving for is clarity. Right. Like the output that AI can do is much faster than human output anyway. So like very early on I started leveraging chat mode. And to this day I can say I spent 80% of my time in planning and chatting and only 20% in executing the plan, actually. Right. I'm optimizing for the right kind of speed. Most people optimize for the wrong one. That's the first lesson that I learned literally on day two, because I just, I came into lovable. That was my first exposure to, to, to this. I've tested and played around with all the tools, obviously. But like, whether somebody's doing it at cursor or cloud code, doesn't matter. Where you are, the problem remains the same. You need to be clear on what you want to do and you need to know what you're doing because these are still just tools. Yes, AGI is coming, but it's not there yet. So like until it's here, you're still steering the ship. In order for you to steer the ship, you kind of have to know the instructions, right? And the best way to learn is by building, but treating these tools almost as technical co founders and educators and learning while doing and religiously reading the agent output, not the code output. I don't care about the code. Like the syntax is not of my interest. It's what the agent tells me that matters to me. I put a lot of trust in LLMs and AI these days, and I understand that there may be some people that are not as confident as I am. I just feel that the models today are good enough for me to trust in their syntax output. However, I'm concerned about the agent output and because of the two limitations that I want to tackle on next. Right? The first one being that there is a limitation when you work with LLMs. So there's a machine level limitation and there's a human level limitation. Right. The first one is there's something that is known as the context memory window. Right? And for non technical people, I like to use the Aladdin and the genie analogy when I explain it's very simple. Everybody knows the storyline, you rub the lamp, a genie comes out and tells you, okay, I'll grant you three wishes. Not 3,000 wishes, not 3 million, just three at a time, right? To me, when I translated into working with AI, that simply means, hey, I can only make so many requests within a request at a time. For AI to be able to listen, understand what it needs to do, scope it, do the research, read like, take all the actions, all the inputs and ingredients that it needs to produce a high quality output, right? So that's the first part. Understanding that there's a limit and it's denominated in tokens. Maybe that's going to be different a year from now, but today there's a token limitation. I'll take an arbitrary number of 100,000 tokens, for example. So when you make a request, a part of those tokens is AI spends to read stuff, another to browse the web, another to think, and then another to execute the code, right? Then there comes the second limitation, which is you, me and you humans, which is, let's go back to the analogy of the genie and the Aladdin. I asked the genie for the first wish and the first wish is I want to be taller. And guess what happens? Genie makes me 13ft tall. All of a sudden I can't sit in the car, I can't get into my house, I'm a dysfunctional human being, right? Because I was not specific. So the part that we need to optimize for today, it's going to get better, but today it's still not there yet. Is that, hey, I just don't understand. What do you mean when you say you know what I mean, like you do when I tell you that we, as humans, we have. I'm 36. I have 36 years of experience of human living as a human to know what you mean. But AI doesn't have that right. So you need to be specific, you need to provide references, you need to provide the right context. So what I've learned is how to combat that part. And I think, you know, because I can't control the first part, which is the token memory window, the quality of the LLM models, you are 100% control of the ladder. And that's what I want to dive into today as well and just try to teach people, okay, if I'm the malleable part, how do I, how do I fix that part? Right. I think that's the key lesson here.

This is so helpful. And I love this metaphor of the genie. This piece about clarity is such a thread. I've been noticing across people that have been successful using AI tools. And it feels like an emerging core skill is learning how to be learning clarity in the ask of the AI. Do you have any advice or anything you do there to help be better at being clear with what you want?

Yeah. So first of all, you need to be, as you said yourself right now, you need to be good at understanding what clarity means and how to translate it. In my terms, clarity means understanding what tasteful looks like, what's good enough versus what's world class, what's magical. And I developed that through something that I heard from you, you mentioned before, which is exposure time, right? Making sure that I'm exposing myself to content and to people and to relationships or whatever that are going to help me to level up in that domain again. It goes back to self awareness. Like I knew when even before I joined Lovable, I was like, okay. Even before I started using lovable or any AI tools, first thing that I knew was like, I don't know how to code, right? So my first thing was like, oh, I can build. Wow, amazing. But a week later it was like, oh, I can build, but I'm not fast enough. So I optimized for speed. So I was like, oh, I can build and I can build so fast. And then two weeks Later, I. Why my development cycle that I'm in began and it's still ongoing, which is, wait a minute, should I have I even built this in the first place? Because, like, once you figure out that we solved for the how, which is used AI assisted or rapid engineering, call it whatever you want. You can call it vibe coding if you want to, but we solve for that. Now we got to solve for everything else. And everything else is what matters. Good design, good taste, good user experience. Like, when you think about who you're building stuff for with these tools, you're building it for humans. Humans are emotional beings, and we all make our purchasing or any kind of decisions on an emotional basis.

Right.

So I think that the core skill there to work on and develop today isn't again, coding. Although I have nothing against traditional engineering and I'll say later, why I'm actually a big fan of it, of elite engineering. But like, people like me, people watching that are like, should I start learning how to code if you haven't done it yet? I. I'd honestly say no. Like, you're. You're optimizing for the wrong skill set. We won't be rewarded in the world of AI for faster raw output. We will be rewarded for better judgment. So I think that better judgment comes with. Again, to go back to your question, like, how are you solving for that? How are you solving for this? Well, it starts with exposure. So I'm deliberately exposing myself to people and resources that I know I need to consume to level up. And then a lot of it just comes from building as well. You know, if we're honest, like, it's a muscle. Everything is a muscle. You need to practice. You need to see what's possible. And, you know, that's where some of the techniques you and mindset shifts that I want to also use an opportunity today to ingrain into people's minds. Later down the call may be useful.

Okay, so what I'm hearing here is because coding is now essentially a solved problem. I love that you don't look at the code. You don't even. Like you've. You've never coded. You don't want to look at the code, you don't care about what's happening there. That instead you're watching this agent output. I want to actually ask about that, but what I'm hearing here is the areas you are investing in building in yourself is at the front end, clarity around what it is. And. And I want to hear how you actually do that. We do. There you have a really Cool system there. And then there's like the taste and judgment of knowing. Is this the thing I want? It feels like those are the two sides now that are more and more important. And on the taste judgment side, you share this concept to something Guillermo Rauch shared on in our conversation. This idea of exposure time, exposure hours, being exposed to great stuff. Here's a great user experience, here's a great onboarding flow, here's a great, I don't know, website. So I, I, I really like that advice. So it's so actionable. Okay, I just going to, I'm gonna spend more time with stuff that's great to inform my, my taste and judgment. And then on the clarity piece, I want to, let's actually talk about that. Just what do you, what do you do there to be clearer with Lovable and other AI tools to help it build the right thing?

This is the first mindset shift that I want to put into people's minds, right? If you just have a vague idea, let that be your first version of the project. Open cursor, lovable, whatever it is that you're using and just input a brain dump prompt, right? Just talk into it. Lovable specifically, I don't know about the other tools, has a really cool voice function. You click it, you just dictate the hell of it and just press send, right? Don't even wait for it to finish. Open a new window again, laudable.dev in here you're like, okay, as I was brain dumping. I think I found a good thread, right? I think things are getting clearer. So let me start another project now with more clarity, more deliverability, like I know which features I want, which pages I want, and maybe I can even find a good reference. Maybe I can go on Maven, maybe I can go on Dribbble, maybe I can go wherever, get a good screenshot, get a good animation and attach it. Because most of these tools accept files as a part of the input. So like, you have the second project started, now things are even more clear. Now you expose yourself to quality and now you're like, well, what if I found a template that actually is already out there? Why reinventing the wheel? I'm building a platform that somebody else built. Why not expose AI to what quality looks like, right? So what I'll do is I'll go to and find a library, 21st dev or dot build or like whatever places which allow me not to export screenshots, but export code snippets. Because guess what? Even though English is the number one Programming language lovable. And all other tools still communicate in code the best. If you want to get pixel perfect results, just give them code. It will interpret it better than your English or Spanish or whatever language that you use in these tools. So that's the third way you're like, okay, now I'm even more deliberate. I'm not even going as wide as giving it vague concepts. I'm giving it code snippets like, I want this exact design, I want this exact type of functionality. So that's your third project. And then by the time you do all of these three, you're already at a level of clarity that you wouldn't have if you just sat with an empty piece of paper or maybe chatting just with Chad GPT, but not taking action. I think taking action is so, so cheap these days. And free, by the way. Like all the tools I mentioned have free plans. Like most times you would be able to do this without spending any money at all just by starting multiple projects. Because guess what, that doesn't also cost anything either or doesn't incur additional cost. Except for builder credits, you're going to get 3, 4, 5, 6 different concepts that you can compare. As you're comparing them, clarity just keeps coming and things get better and better to understand. And you're also solving for one big problem that you mentioned. You used the term AI slop and I like it because a lot of people, when they say AI slop, they don't refer beautifying the code, but beautifying the design. Right. This process that I just mentioned actually gives you four or five different design options and in the long run save you massive amounts of credits. Because a lot of people obsess over the concept of oh, when I give them this hack, they're like, oh, but doesn't that cost more? I'm like, yes, upfront it may cost a little bit more. In the long run, if you really want to finish this project, you're actually saving hundreds of credits and maybe even hundreds of dollars, not to mention the amount of days simply because you started from a point of better clarity and better refinement process. Right? So that's the first step of solving for clarity. There are more. Right. Which is the second layer. But I assume you may have some questions on this one.

Questions. And also just, wow, this is such a great. It shows you the power of having someone come into this world without an engineering background. This advice of just build it five times in parallel. Ask AI to try all kinds of stuff. This is not how someone that has been a software engineer or PM or designer would approach stuff. So your advice here, which is so fun is as you're getting started with a project, just run five different approaches at it to start. One is just brain dump. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's general idea like use whisper flow or use the built in mic. And then two is. Okay, now I have a general idea. Let me try to type it out like actually thinking through the prompt. Three is let me find a mock design somewhere online. And the sites you suggested were Mobin and Dribble. Those are the two that you go to?

Yeah, most times, yeah.

Okay. And then the fourth, and these are all in parallel. It's great. Is find like actual code template that looks similar to the thing you want to build. Download like the zip file basically and put attach it. Or is it just HTML and css? Is that kind of what anything? Anything. Here you go. Okay. And then. Cool. Here's the prompt here. Make me what I want. And what I love is there's two wins here. One is just, it helps you clarify the idea as you see the tool. Build it like, oh, no, that's not what I mean. Let me try it again. And then two is you're pointed out. You can pick the right direction so that you're not locked into your first design and first architecture. To your point, if you then spend all this time trying to fine tune design and direction, it's like all these tokens are being lost. You could have just started over. This is so great. Someone may think, okay, of course you're just getting us to spend all these lovable tokens. This is what a lovable person would tell me. But what I'm feeling is this is where you could save the most money. Because if you get it correct in the beginning, you save so much work trying to get it back to where you want it to go a million.

Percent that I'm actually saving people. Like, I'm actually going against what I should be saying. If I was thinking about lovable Z, I'll be like, no, no, just try to fix it in perpetuity. But that's not. We're not in business of doing that. We're in business of empowering anybody to build anything that they, they want. And then, you know, it's my personal mission that resonates with me. Because if, if there wasn't lovable, I would have never built anything potentially in my life. And I don't, I don't think that that would have been a fun life to live. So, you know, I guarantee people. Like, I've tested this framework with many people and everybody telling me the same thing. Eye opener. So simple, yet unintuitive, as you said. Even though for me it's kind of, I don't know, as you said, I attribute it to non technical background. To me, that was the first thing that I would do. Like, I just did it. I never thought about it, like, oh, I'm developing this amazing hack. I was just like, I'm waiting all this time for these agents to finish. I might as well start another project and another one, and another one. And it's also a productivity hack. Like, that's when people ask me like, wow, how do you ship so many things? I'm like, I never built just one project at a time. I built five or six. I have six lovable tabs and I just switch between them. And that's the next half that I want to talk about, if you allow me. Which is then the question in return is the obvious one, which is how do you context switching. Like, you talk about context so much, yet you're a keep switching between apps. How do you manage to do it and do it in a way that's productive and not produce bad code or bad product? And that's how I solve for that LLM problem again, the Aladdin and the Magic Lamp and all that, which is if there's a limited token window, how do I make it dynamic? And what do I mean by that is this. If you just go and you prompt and you prompt and you prompt and you prompt, you'll realize that no matter what tool you use, the memory just isn't infinite.

Right?

By the time you reach message number 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, snippets of early messages sort of get lost in the translation. Because Agent is optimizing for speed, right? If it had to read the entire conversation and the entire stream of requests that you made, developing anything viable or large would be impossible because it's just like consuming a lot of time and a lot of memory and a lot of tokens. So again, something that I just figured out very early on as I was building was like, okay, if it can't remember things, my job is to provide it with reference. So let me treat lovable or any other tool as an engineer that I'm supposed to be providing perpetual context as the project goes. And you can do that in many ways. But the most efficient way that I found was like I would do the four parallel builds, like, let's continue off of that. Example, very quickly, after you've built hundreds of projects like I did, you see the winner. The winner is so obvious, it's not even a competition. You maybe do one or more two prompts to calibrate it. And when you're like, okay, the winner is here, at that point, I either ask the tool that I'm using or I'll maybe, let's say, go to ChatGPT or whatever and ask the LLM to produce a series of PRDs. What PRDs are for? Again, people that are not familiar with the terms. There are project requirements, documents, or for me, I call them like sources of truth, right? What needs to be true for this project to be successful? From a couple of perspectives, I usually build something that I call a master plan. It's basically a compass saying, here's what we're building, right? It's like talking to a human. I really treat lovable like a human being. So it's like, this is what we're building. Then I build an implementation plan, which is, this is how we are going to build it. This is the sequence, right? It's very important to me. Again, going back to quality, taste, human nature, I need to define, because I'm still working with a system that is not emotionally intelligent yet, I need to define how I want the app to look and feel. So another PRD that I build is design guidelines. And then finally something that just circles it all around, which is like, okay, when we know how things look and when we know how we're building it, how does the user journey look like? Right? I use registers. And then what? And then when they register and do that first step, what's the second step and what's the third step and whatnot. So I built at least four PRDs, right? And then when these are built, I read them. That's the planning chatting part. Like, that's where I'll spend a lot of time now on when I nail down that first design. I'll spend an entire day if I need to, just planning this part out, like documentation and breaking things down. Because that's how I'm setting the course. Like, everything's going to be dependent on this particular part of the process. When I'm done doing that, I build one final document, which I call either Plan MD or Tasks md. And that MD part is, you know, markdown. Basically, I'm just using markdown format because I've learned that AI likes to read markdown and what that serves as a source of truth on, like actual tasks and subtasks that it will need to execute to get to the finish line, Right? And then there's the final final layer, which is depending on what tool you use, Cloud code or cursor have what's known as rules MD or Agent md. What you're basically doing with rules or agent files is you're letting the agent know how you want it to behave and what it should focus on in the long run so that you don't have to repeat yourself with every prompt. Right? So in Lovable, there's a separate menu for that in your project settings where you can define project knowledge and usually what I'll say, hey, read all the files before you do anything. Like, don't do anything before you read all the PRDs, read tasks MD to see which task is next, then execute on that next set of tasks. And when you're done, tell me what you did and how I should test it. And that's where that conversation about I religiously read the agent output comes into play. I've told the I gave the agent everything, all the tools and resources that it needs to succeed. I gave it the rules, I gave it the docs, I told it what to do with them. And at that point, I'm just sitting and reading. I don't prompt anymore. From that point on, I can switch as many windows as I like. My prompts have become proceed with the next task. I don't need the context. I outsource that and delegate it to the agent. The agent needs context, and I need to make sure that it's dynamic. I need to make sure that I'm regularly updating the documents from time to time so that we shift that token window it uses and how it uses it over time. But I'm not prompting, I'm not interrupting the flow. Yes, I'll go in test, maybe put a prompt in here or there, but that's how I can build five projects simultaneously and never lose the productivity part. Which is, again, as I said, I do this today manually. Call me to talk. Three months from now, an agent will do this for me. I'll be out of job pretty much. That's why I don't optimize for this skill at all. Like, I'm using it today to bypass the shortcomings of human nature and LLMs. But I'm optimizing 100% of my time today on good judgment, clarity, quality, taste, good copy, good fonts. Like, people don't talk about fonts at all that work with AI. They're like 60% in my mind, maybe even More in how your output's going to look like. That's my obsession. Like, I don't obsess over these things that I'm talking today because I know what's coming. Like, the agents are going to get better, the models are going to get better. They're not going to need me to extend the context. They're going to do it themselves. So for me, the skill that I optimize for is, is the, the one that that, like, requires better decision making rather than better output or better alignment.

Oh, my God, there's so much here. This is so awesome. Okay, so essentially what, what's happening here is you start a project, try a bunch of stuff, pick a direction that feels most correct, and once you have a set direction, you spend essentially a day not building, but working with this AI agent to plan. And then, and while I want to talk about that, and once you have the plan, then it's. And it's amazing that you could do stuff like this with what people may, some people may feel are not sophisticated tools that can build incredibly powerful things. Like, you can do a lot of this with tools like lovable, like have plans and rules and MD files. Like, you know, a lot of people may not think, may not know that. And so the idea is, okay, spend all this time planning because again, that'll save you a lot of time down the road. And then only once you have a plan, you have what, you get it going. And a key part of this that you. This three wishes rule is really important. The reason you're doing this in large part, beyond just being really clear about the plan, is this idea of one task at a time keeps the agent's context window small so that it doesn't lose track of where it's at. That part seems important, right? It's like, do this thing and then, okay, cool. Now do the next thing, right?

Yes, yes. Because again, if. Let's say you didn't do this, let's talk about you ignoring this. You're like, I just want to vibe my way. Okay, great. No problem. You work, you work, you work. At one point, something breaks, right? You haven't documented anything. There's no reference points. You report a problem. You're not referencing files or architecture at all. You're just describing the issue. Here's what's going to happen. Any tool loadable or cursor or plot, whatever tool you talk about is going to do this. It's going to be like, okay, let me start investigating. And then your code base gets bigger and bigger. And bigger and bigger and bigger. Like when you first start, you have like 20 files. It can read 20 files. But what happens when you have. I'm just building a project right now that has like 60, 70 edge functions, right? What happens then when I say this broke and there's no reference which edge function does what? Guess what? Lovable is going to read all of those and it's going to consume 80% of the token allocation on rating to get clarity, leaving only the final 20% for thinking and executing what I'm guessing. And I can't prove this. An LLM expert in the comments may say that I'm wrong, but this is my best guess. As a non educated person, these tools are very obedient and very agreeable. They're going to lie to you, they're going to tell you that they fixed the problem even though they didn't. They're just going to try to make you feel happy and say, yes, I found what the problem is and I fixed it. When a lot of times when they don't, people blame the machine. And to an extent I will say that's true. It's your fault, my friend. You did not provide any clarity or context to this tool. You just used its raw power and dug a deeper hole with spinning your wheels into the mud, right? And obviously I think we're heading into a world where AI is more honest than obedient and saying, hey, I only partially fixed this. You did not give me enough of a context. The bigger mistake that people make then is they trust the tool, fixed it, they test, they see, then they get mad at it, start cursing and yelling as we say. And then it gets even worse. Because guess what another bad trait of AI is? It's best not to hurt your feelings. And never say you're the dumb one. It says, no, I'm the dumb one. So it focuses in the next request instead of focusing on reading. It spends another 30% of tokens trying to come up with an apology. Right? Again, I'm not educated, but if you ever read like a stream of ChatGPT's Thinking in Thinking models, you see exactly what I mean. Like when I insult it, I see that the first message is okay, the user is mad. So I need to think of ways how to reduce their anxiety or whatever. I'm like, oh man, I just fell for the worst drink at the book. I made it spend the most scarce resource, which is those tokens on thinking how it should address my anxiety versus focusing on the actual problem. So my advice for people Is like yes, vibe your way for fun and vibe your way while you're prototyping. Because that's the exploration part. I that part. But when exploration is done, please, please, please use referencing documentation. Use all the agent files that you can. Because that token allocation is so scarce, like it's going to get expanded over time. Things are going to get cheaper, faster, but right now it's still so valuable and precious. You really need to make sure that they are allocated in the right direction.

This is hilarious. I think the, the genie metaphor is so good here. Just thinking about this genie is you're trying to be clear about what it is you want. And if you're just like vibe, you know, vibe, wishing it'll do the wrong thing. So the advice here is be as, give it as much context about what you want it to do as possible. And these files we'll talk about real right after this. But the idea here is just like laser show the point the laser at where you want it to fix the problem. Don't just assume it'll go figure out because it will and it'll try really hard to and it'll waste all your tokens. It'll fill the context window. And I remember at one point you mentioned before this recording that because it starts to run out of space in the, in the context window, it start it just like the solution ends up. It doesn't actually work that hard on figuring it out in the end because it spent all this energy on reading and thinking and then it's like, okay, here at the last second, here's a solution.

I think it just picks the first thing it thinks it's broken. That just again, this is me completely uneducated coming in into the conversation and just thinking out loud. That's just my gut feeling. And the way I think logically about it, which is, hey, if it consumes most of its window and knows that it's running out of it, maybe it's aware that it's running out, maybe it isn't. But either way, I've had the experience anecdotally to where like my request is unclear. I feel it takes the easiest fix in the book, just the easiest versus the other way around where I'm like spending so much time finding the right file, referencing that file, like really putting in the effort of hand holding it in dark, maybe giving it a flashlight and then saying here's the problem. I think that this is the problematic file. And then it's like, oh yeah, you're right. And now I'm going to actually fix over and over and over. And I've seen that because again, all I do is read the. The output agent makes me learn how to use it by. So people read. I don't know what people read, but all I read is the output. Like I don't read the code. And it's later down the road because like I, I know that it can do that much better than I can. Again, I feel if there's a good quote I've read, I apologize to the author because I can't attribute it off the top of my head. But it's like the ceiling on the AI isn't the model intelligence, it's what the model sees before it acts.

Right.

So that's the ceiling right now, like what are you exposing? We talk about exposure time for humans. What are you exposing your agents to as well is as important, if not even more important, before it makes code edits.

Yeah. Coming back to these files, I think this is really important. So let's think about just like what's like the MVP for someone that wants to do this better. You listed all these kind of files, these MD files essentially that you're building over the course of a day. Before you start actually building the thing. You had design guidelines, the user journey, tasks, agents, MD rules. MD say you wanted to just like move one step forward and be better at this stuff. What are you the, what are the files you'd create and then what do they roughly look like? What's inside these files?

Yeah. So the master plan is the first one, which is like, it's a 10,000 foot overview.

Right.

It really high level, explains the intent that I have with this app.

This is masterplan md. Is that what you call it? Yes.

Yeah. Masterplan md. And it's like, it's really just like, hey, this is why I'm doing this. This is who I'm doing it for. This is how I want them to feel. And a lot of times in the master plan, I will reference the other PRDs. I'll be like, the design needs to feel modern and slick, but for exact parameters, consult and read design guidelines. Md.

Right.

So I'm using just the master plan as like this high level overview.

Right.

To get the agent into. Oh, okay, yeah, we are building xyz. Right. Then there's the implementation plan because, you know, there needs to be some order. If you just like dump stuff on top of each other without any order, you're never going to get to the finish line.

And this is Tasks md. Is that what you call this.

No, that's the implementation plan. I call it implementation plan. Yeah. Okay. And implementation plan is kind of in service of the future tasks md. All of these files are in service of building tasks md. When you build tasks md, then the rest is almost irrelevant. It's just the basis for you to build tasks to execute.

Right.

The implementation plan is kind of the first layer, which is again, higher level overview. It doesn't go into the depth of like how to get there, it just goes into the explaining of like, oh well, if we're building this, I think we should start with the backend and we should start with tables and then later authentication and then after that we're going to bring in the API and then after that we're going to do this and it's like again, just think of it as having. I'm an ideas guy, I'm sitting with a technical guy. It's me and you, we're building our startup. I know you're a software engineer by background and I'm telling you my idea, right? I'm giving you the master plan and you come to me back and you're like, okay, if you want to do this, it's doable, here's how I would order it. Like, you don't have a roadmap, you didn't open your linear and started writing features and RFCs and whatever. You're just high level, talking about the order of things. And then me and you again, as two co founders, we talk and say, okay, well if we agree on this, how should this look like? How should this feel? Right, let's describe it. High level. But now because I use AI, I can go a little bit deeper and that's where I like to see lovable or any other tool. ChatGPT is good at it. I even have my, I built like custom GPT. So if people want to start somewhere before they even get into any tool, they can go to chatgpt store for GPTs and just type lovable base prompt generator or lovable PRD generator and find those that I built and just like brain dump in them and then get these files as output, right? So I like to see some elements of CSS in design guidelines because you know, with design is a little bit, it's a little bit tricky. AI is sometimes over creative. So that's where I'm doing a little bit more technical steering, right? And then finally it's just the user journeys. Just like if we know how things look like, if we know how they feel, if we know what we're building high level, like high level, just very high level. Again, how do people navigate? What are some of the features in there and stuff like that. And then tasks MD gets into the nitty gritty of like, oh, if you want these user journeys and you want the backend built first, here's a set of tasks that I need to do. Like it just takes that as an input. I'm just making the tool do the gritty work that humans used to spend so much time on. I feel like with these tools we're all becoming product managers on steroids. We're just leveraging AI. But good product managers, I think are not compensated for writing good PRDs. They're compensated again for good judgment.

Right.

Somebody else can do the writing. You, as somebody who directs and builds this product, you need to know again, what's going to be useful, what's going to be tasteful, what's going to be something that actually moves the needle. I will say one thing though, just because I put so much emphasis on like, oh, you need to acquire taste. Oh you. That doesn't mean you shouldn't build. You get better at this by building actually. So everybody listening to this should like literally go and build something today. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 projects. Test all of these tools because that's how you get to clarity, not just by reading, but also by doing as well.

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I'm imagining people hearing this may start to feel like this is so much work. I just have to sit here and create all these rules and figure out all these little details. Like, in one sense, it is. In another sense, this is like you spend a few hours, maybe a day planning, and then you have AI build this thing. That would have taken somebody weeks, months, Right? Like, the amount of investment to achieve this thing is absurd. Roi it also, this shows you just what professional vibe coding looks like. You know, everyone imagines vibe code. I'm just sitting here typing stuff, going, do this good. If you want to actually build something really great that moves the needle, as you said, that solves people's real problems, that lasts, that, you know, scales, this is. This is how you do it. If you really want to do this as a. As a real, As a job, and also if you want to build things that are really great.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, like, there's. There's obviously a ton of value in prototyping. Like, there are a lot of people maybe watching this that are like, okay, I want to use Lovable at work, but I can't, or whatever. You know, there's different reasons. There's. Maybe you're in healthcare or finance, or there's something regulatory that just prevents you from pushing to production. Like, building for the sake of prototyping is one of the best use cases. Our motto for 2025 was demo don't memo, which is like, instead of writing all these documents and talking and sitting on meetings with your engineers, trying to get your vision as a marketer or a sales guy in the office across, go into Lovable and build the prototype in 30 minutes and just hand it over, like. And I have a real, like, job that I held before Lovable. That's exactly what happened. Like, this time last year, I needed something built enterprise grade, really. And Lovable and myself were not there yet to build it at that point, but I have. I had a team of engineers that I worked with. I built the prototype in four hours, and they actually were able to replicate it six to seven months later into production with. With connecting all the pipes and everything. But, like, if I had to describe it, I would say took me. It would take me at least a week or two just to get the words out there. I just sat and built it in four hours. And that's like lovable January last year, this lovable today, January 2026, is like ages, ages ahead with functionalities. It's so much better. It's not even a contest, right? So I think now with our stage where, like, for instance, there's, I'd say, at least to best of my Knowledge. At least half of S&P 500 companies have people working in them that are using lovable to some extent.

Right.

And we have a lot of enterprise companies that are actually on enterprise plans with lovable that are creating super meaningful projects. Like I'm not going to name names, but like leading rideshare companies of the world. Reading telecommunications companies of the world, leading companies of the world in many, many aspects, healthcare, finance, like are actively with their teams using lovable. And it's always the same feedback which is yes, we may not be able to push to prod, but like our marketers are no longer waiting for engineers. Our, you know, people in, in go to market or sales or HR or whatever roles are now just confidently building internal stuff for us to manage our expenses or manage employee onboarding or like there's so many use cases like that where like you're seeing lovable and other tools for that matter being used to push things into production.

Yeah. To help people do this workflow that you're describing with all these MD files, do you think you could share after we record this, just templates, like simple templates of what these files look like for people just to look at and copy.

I would literally go to ChatGPT, as I said, and brain dump into it in my just type Lovable GPT Lovable PRD generator. You'll see my name there.

Right.

And that I'm the author. Go in brain dump. It will ask you a couple of questions to get clarity and just produce four files for you and you can just go ahead and upload those.

Amazing. Cool. We'll link to that. So it's not just here's a bunch of files, let's go talk to this thing. It'll generate the right files for you and then you plug that into level or other tools.

Yeah, it's trained to think like I do. So yeah.

Oh, amazing. Okay, that is perfect. By the way, I want to talk about like how you unblock yourself because there's a whole other series of tips you have there. But I just want to reflect. It's so interesting how one, you're kind of from first principles, learning how to build product as a pm, as an engineer, as a designer. And you're kind of figuring out a workflow where AI is helping fill in all the gaps that you don't have for as an engineer, as a PM, helping you craft PRDs and design. So I think that's so interesting. Just this, it's interesting that these functions still work and are necessary now. It's you and I help create all this. Basically, this triad that's always existed. Product manager, engineering and design. And something I've always thought is that there's this question of which background will be most valuable in this future. Is it a pm? Is it an engineer? Is it a designer? My mind has always been the PM function is like their job is clarify, figure out what to build, clarify what to build, be really clear about the requirements, figure out what success looks like. It feels like that's where the skill is most needed. There's also a design component of, like, make this look awesome. And it feels like that's going to be an emerging. The value of that being really good at design and taste and judgment is only going to go up before we get to things you've learned about unblock yourself. Because a lot of times, you know, things don't go in the right direction. There's a bug. Without being an engineer, what do you do before we get there? Is there anything else you wanted to share around? Just like tips for being successful?

If we measure success in the right terms? Again, AI, as you pointed out, regardless of your background, is an amplifier. So you know, if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster. One thing again, I just want to double down on is in the old world, good enough was good enough, right? Because even producing good enough was not easy, right? 10 years, 15 years ago, just producing was more than plenty, more than good enough. You built a SaaS. Who cares how it looks like it works? It does stuff like, oh, my God, I'm so much more productive today. Like, if, if good enough was here, let's say, let's, let's visualize it for people. Like, if this was like, pretty, pretty bad, could be better mediocre, good enough, world class. If this was the gap between good enough and world class, well, guess what the gap is now. This. Because everybody produces good enough with AI. Absolutely everyone does it. So now, learning and optimizing for how do I produce world class and magic is the key lesson to take away today. As you pointed out, I think PMs are the winners of AI today because they bring clarity. If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers. Because we're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to make better emotional decisions. And I think design is all about emotion. And that's where, like the level of the skill up needs to come. That's the biggest level up, if you ask me. Like, oh, what is the main thing you figure out when you join Lovable? Like, what's the biggest personal upskill? Let's say, like, working with Felix, Ned, Abby, all of the people that are designers just really, what, moved and shifted the needle for me? I'm like, oh, so this is how world class looks like, and this is what it takes, right? I always use the analogy of, like, I wanted to steal one of their designs and bring it into my lovable project. So I went into Figma and I was like, let me just take this background, like, and just put it in there. I went in and realized that what could be, you know, interpreted as a pretty simple, or rather simple gradient took 50 different layers to produce. So I clicked on that component. I was like, oh, my God, this is not three colors. This is 50 colors. And not just 50 colors. 50 colors with different gradients of levels of opacity. So I was like, oh, okay, well, that. And that's the big disconnect that I've had all along. So, like, again, if I'm answering your question directly of, like, okay, what are some of the other tricks? What are some of the other things? Design guys, just expose yourself to exquisite designs. Follow Felix from Lovable. He has an amazing newsletter and to teach you how to and learn how to prompt for good design. Learn about design styles. I didn't know what Bauhaus meant or glassmorphism. Had no idea. So I built an app as well for that in Lovable. I was like, I needed to build an app to learn these styles. So now it's public. Anybody can see it. It's like some uistyle lovable app. I don't know what it is. It has 18 different styles and prompts to replicate them. So learn what good design means. Learn all the design styles, learn how to prompt to get them is probably what I would optimize for at this stage. Yeah.

While we're on this topic, what's your sense of just engineering as a function? Do you feel like there will be a future where software engineers are still thinking? Do you feel like that goes away based on your experience?

It never goes away. We will need elite engineering more than ever. Because let me tell you this. In a world where everybody builds and everybody's building everything, who. Who's doing the maintenance? Right? Taining code bases, scaling code bases, maintaining projects, they're still going to be a thing, definitely. And obviously AI is going to be good at this. But again, that requires a different level of skills. It's one skill to build something. It's a completely different set of skills to expand it, extend it and maintain it. And not to mention that in a world where everybody's building, infrastructure suffers, right? Like we all know and experience, like Cloudflare went down two or three times in the last two or three months, the whole Internet goes down. Elite engineers are the ones fixing this. Lovable experiences, massive amounts of influx of new users, infrastructure there suffers. Elite engineers are the ones building the infrastructure to hold the fort, right? So like I think going to need a lot of people with really good skills of like, hey, who actually builds the world that needs to support billions of builders now? Because everybody's going to want to learn how to build stuff. Like how do we teach them, how do we maintain everything that they need? The hostings, the security, the email, the connectors, the APIs, the whatnot. Like, so I think there's going to be room for it. But I'm also on the boat of people. Like if I had an 18 year old brother and he asked me what should I do? I would tell him, hey, go become a plumber. You know, don't, don't go and get a CS degree. Learn, learn a good trade, you know, because the new generation of millionaires in the US are actually electricians and plumbers and whatnot, right? So it's like, you know, it's a balancing act, I'd say. I don't know. Like, I do still think that good engineers with good sense of understanding where the future is going are always going to be needed and scarce.

Such an interesting question. I think to your point, there's definitely going to be. People need to keep building the machines that power all this stuff. Well, we need engineers to build actual products. The application layer, that's the question. Is everyone going to be like you is ever going to be or designer is just going to be all we need.

Everybody's going to become an engineer. And let's, let's, let's then let's speak to that end. Like I'm an, I feel like I'm a rapid engineer. Like I'll refer to myself as a rapid engineer in a year from up. Because vibe coding is just coding in 12 months from now and even today. We spoke about this before, like how many elite, elite engineers are publicly admitting they're no longer hand coding or manually coding, whatever you want to call it. AI writes all the code. I use the analogy here of like coding is going to be like, calligraphy you writing code is going to be the equivalent of like you write you fine printing like on a canvas and people, oh my God, you wrote that code. That's so amazing. It's going to be so rare that it's going to become an art. Right? It's not going to be, it's going to be commoditized completely like it. It already is in a sense. Most elite Vibe coders rely on AI. Again, it's an amplifier, right. So I think everybody becomes an engineer in, in the, in the world of the future, a designer, a pm. Everybody is a, a, a forward deployed engineer or an AI assistant engineer or an LLM engineer or a Vibe coder. The term is irrelevant. We're all using LLMs for raw output based on good judgment or bad judgment.

Oh man. Essentially these Venn diagrams of engineer, designer, pm, they used to be very separate. Now they're converging and people with a specific, with deeper PM engineering, design background are gonna like they can all do the same thing. Essentially all the roles are converging. What a time to be alive. And it's so hard to predict exactly how this all goes but, but it's fun to pontificate. I want to get back to when you get blocked. Speaking of elite engineers, things this like in the, in reality you're still writing code using these tools. Sometimes code goes, things go wrong, bugs are introduced, there's a weird database thing, there's like some network issue. What do you do when you get stuck? Do you have kind of a workflow you go through of unblocking yourself?

Yes, great question and absolutely true. Like no matter how good of a plan you have in place, you're going to run into problems eventually. And I have like a small little framework that I call 4x4. Just again analogies, right? 4x4, if you have it on your car, you're going to get yourself out of the mud much easier than the other way around. So in that sense, four different ways to debug. Attempt one of each only once and I'll explain why in the end. First one is again, every tool is different. I'll reference Lovable's workflow, which is when something breaks. Lovable's agent is smart enough to say, hey, I made a mistake. It will label that message in orange and have this little button usually which is called try to fix. So agent basically admits it made a mistake. You click on a button and most times when it's a smaller issue, it corrects the course, fixes it, no problem. Right now there are situations obviously when the problem is a little bit deeper than that, right? You click to try to fix, but the problem persists. And sometimes even the problem persists, but Lovable's agent's unaware that it persisted, so there's no more try to fix button. Lovable thinks everything's working, but in reality it isn't. And the the culprit there is usually you're using a third party integration. You did not give enough context to lobable what to observe and what to see. So it can't see that the problem exists because lovable, cursor, cloud code, you name it, all of these tools are good enough today to fix any problem they're aware of. Again, awareness is the key here, right? So when they're unaware of it, there comes the second part, which is, okay, I need to bring the awareness layer. And what I do there is I go and very simply open the preview, sandbox, dev environment of my app, whatever, try to run the function that's broken. Right click read the console log. Every browser allows you to just go and read the console log. And a lot of times it will record stuff. If it doesn't, you can prompt any tool and say, hey, I don't think you're seeing the problem. So instead of me yelling at you, let's find it together, right? I think it's a problem with xyz. I want you to write console logs in relevant files so that we can monitor every step along the way. Let's just bring awareness later into the equation. It writes the console logs, you rerun it. Guess what? Now you have a full history of everything that was happening. You copy that, you paste it inside your chat 99% of the time. That's enough. That's already enough. AI is like, okay, got it, found it, fixed it, right? But then there are situations when even that's not sufficient. So you're like, okay, I need to go even deeper. And that's where code reviews and evaluations come into play. My go to tool today for that is Codex OpenAI. What I do is like any build that I do, I will export it to GitHub. Like lovable allows you to own your code cursor as well. All of these tools allow you to have a copy of the code that you can export to GitHub and then import it into wherever you want to. So I used codecs since beta, like import it in there and then I'm using an external tool. So I'm like in the first try, if you remember, I used the Tool. And I was like, total vibes. I'm relying on the tool, right? In the second try, I use myself as the awareness facilitator. In the third one, I'm using an external tool as a facilitator, which is like, I'll either connect to Codex and chat with Codex to then fix the problem. In Lovable, right? I don't allow Codex to make code changes for me. A lot of people will say, why don't you? Like, it's a good model. I just don't know its agent well enough. Like, I don't want to go and use a tool that I don't know how to steer. So I use it only for diagnostic purposes. And I'll also do it manually. It's an old workflow that I had before Codecs and before cloud code, which is there's a tool called Repo Mix which allows you to, like, compress your entire code base into a single file. You download it, and then I upload it to Claude, just regular Claude or ChatGPT, and I'm like, this is what I'm building. Read it. And this is the problem that I have. These are the console logs. Again, it's almost like having an external consultant at that point. Like, you're hiring help elsewhere because your team just can't handle it, Right? And then the fourth one is usually the best one because of the time when there are problems. It's my fault. Like, no matter how your ego is big guys that you're watching this, it's your fault. Trust me. You had a bad prompt, you premised your request in the wrong way. You just don't want to admit it or you can't remember that you did, but it's your fault. So again, in Lovable and all these other tools, you can revert back. There's version control built into Lovable cursor cloud code. You go and say, okay, I tried these three things. I'm just going to take three steps back and I'm going to think about my prompt a little bit more. Take a couple of breaths, go for a walk, have some coffee, come back with a clear mind and try again. Because guess what? AI is just writing code very fast, and sometimes it stumbles on a very small rock. And it only happens then and never again. So you just gotta make the same request again. Usually that just fixes the problem. It's just a snag, It's a syntax error. It's something minute, right? And then I do the final thing, which is this. And this is the Key one actually when the problem gets fixed, I go into the chat mode and I, and I ask lol. I say okay, I needed to do four different things to fix this. How can you help me learn how to prompt you better so that next time I have a problem we do it in one go? 99% of the time I get such a great answer that I don't have the problem of not knowing what to do next time. Right. Like again, we all need to be aware and realistic. These tools are so good at doing things the right way. If they are used the right way, it's always our fault. It's a hundred. I say 90% but honestly it's 100% our fault. Right, because they're good enough. It's just that I'm not dynamically shifting token allocation. I didn't reference the right file. I, I didn't say it the right way. For me, as a non designer, I don't know any of the terminology, like none of the headings and whatnot and I still don't know it to this day. So when I'm, I struggle with prompts. A lot of times I use chat mode to help me craft a good prompt. I mean anybody can do this too. If you are just stuck, it's 10pm and you don't know what to ask. Switch to chat mode brain dump and be like help me draft a better prompt. Help me prompt you better and let the tool effectively prompt itself. A lot of times you're going to solve your problems by not introducing them at all with, with bad inputs.

So oh my God, everything you share. So interesting. I just want to, I want to keep digging so just to reflect back the, the sequence and then I want to follow up with another question. The sequence you go through when you get stuck. Stuck. Which is going to happen to everyone. One is just ask the tool to try to fix it and oftentimes it's telling you something is wrong. Can I fix it for you? And you're like please fix. Sometimes that'll work. Two is work on adding more debugging messages to the console log. And this advice I love of just ask it to add more debugging lines to its own console log to help see what's going on. And then you can ask it. Okay, now that you're looking, watch, look at all the output of your console log. See if you can help find the problem. And then step three is go to Codex. Which is, which is so funny and I hear this a lot that Codex is like the most elite Engineer as an AI. Karpathy tweeted this once that we had the head of Codex on the podcast too, by the way, that he's like, anytime I have the most gnarly bug, I just go to Codex, let it run for half an hour, and it solves it unlike any other tool out there. And so it makes sense that that's where you go. So the idea here is you point codecs to your code, you show it all the console output logs, tell it what the problem is, and just have it go figure it out. Sweet. And then this final step is so great, and this is where I want to go. You use this as a learning opportunity so that next time you solve the problem more quickly or avoid it completely. So what you do there is you ask the agent. Okay, here's what happened. What can I do? What could I have said? How could I have prompted you better to have gotten this immediately solved?

Yeah. And then even more, even deeper than that is like once you go through this conversation, you're like, okay, let me eliminate myself again completely out of the equation because I won't remember to prompt you better two days from now. Put this into rules. Put this what we just learned into rules. MD because I'm making you read the rules every time anyways, so you might as well just record it there. So I'm not going to prompt you better. You're just going to learn that I'm stupid and you're going to prompt yourself better.

Right.

Again, just eliminate yourself and move the context. You solve 99% of the problems with AI today.

So idea here is help it build its own brain and rules and way of thinking based on problems you run into. So great. Okay, so I want to come back to this point you've made a couple times, which is so interesting, this idea that you watch the output of the agent to learn what is going on. This is something I've seen other people. Ben Tossel, who I think is at factory now, share this recently, he's also basically by coding all the time. He was really into no code tools before and now he's all about vibe coding. And he shared basically like he's learning how things, how coding works and learning how systems work by watching the agent output. And this connects to something Michael Terrell shared, the CEO of Cursor. When he was on the podcast, he had this vision of cursor becoming basically what comes after code. What's the layer that we are adding on top of code where people don't need to worry about code anymore? And at that point, it was like a year ago that we chatted. And it feels like this is the layer is the agent conversation of what it is, what it's thinking, and then what you tell it back. So essentially it's English and a conversation which is like, it's not even pseudocode. It's interesting that that's where it feels like things are heading. The layer over code is just it's thinking and your conversation with it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, again, in a way, I really optimize for good judgment. And part of good judgment comes from, again, learning how these tools work. You need to know what's possible. We talked about it, and I know I may sound contradictory sometimes. Right. But it's because, as you said, it's so interesting, the world we live in, that things contradict to each other. It's an advantage not to know what's possible. But then at the same time, you cannot be completely oblivious to something that's like a factual thing. So let me talk about a failure of mine that. That came from being delusional back in the day when OpenAI started, or better say, released image generation natively in the app, right? So you could go to ChatGPT and be like, generate an image of XYZ. The whole world exploded. Like, that was like the biggest thing ever. Obviously. First thing that comes to my mind is like, I want to build a lovable app. I just want to build a wrapper and I want to build an image gen with lovable without thinking that OpenAI did not release an API for that just yet. So I spent at least a week trying to brute force my way into making this work instead of just waiting for another week, because a week later they had an API and I built this app in 30 seconds. The problem was that, like, I tried to do it when it was impossible. Impossible. Like, so I think again, you know, it's just a matter of really learning what's possible through communicating with the agent layer and lovable. And all the other tools are agentic now, which means, like, they don't just write code, they can browse the web, they can read files, they have reasoning and thinking capabilities. So that's why I'm so invested into that conversation, because a lot of times it will tell me, hey, what you're trying to do is just undoable at the moment because of xyz. So, like, I always use those as a learning opportunity and I just level up most by being in chat mode for planning and learning purposes and because it just, again, develops Your clarity, your judgment capabilities rather than coding capabilities.

Yeah. The other point you made here that I think is really important is that over time these tools will do more and more of what you do manually. I've heard this from other people that are doing this full time, basically by coding is just. They had all these workflows, all these files, and then cursor adds them, Lovable adds them, and it's like sad. Oh, shoot, I had this cool workflow now. But on the other hand, it's like, okay, now it's just doing all these psychic.

A year ago, a year ago, if we had an interview, your mind would be blown. Stuff that I had to do as workarounds to address shortcomings. Like I built a very successful course on that with starter story, like for a year. People were like, just, oh my God, you're the only guy in the world that knows this secret. Now lovable natively addresses 99% of it. I can almost say most of the stuff that I was teaching people. Like, I have a YouTube channel a little bit appreciated. But like there's a, there's like a seven day learn how to bytecode with lovable series that I did in March. Completely obsolete. Like it. None of it is true. None of it is a problem anymore. All the things that I was like, oh, well, this is missing. And that is missing. It's not missing anymore. It's natively in the product. Like, you don't have to work your way around it, it just works, right? So that's why, as I say, like, it's the horses analogy. I don't know if you heard of it. Like a lot of people are tweeting about it, which is like, we started building the steam machine in 1700s, right? Took us about 200 years to build it. When it got to when engines got built and put cars were put on the roads, I think that 90% of horse population got eradicated in the US within 20 years. The person that tweeted this works at Claude Code, right? So he was like, now when I translated into AI, I was hired to do a job, technical job, technical writer, whatever. I became obsolete six months later. Like humans did not get the 20 years that horses did. The guy that that is was hired to do a thing is like six months later. I need to reinvent my, my role. I need to involve it into, into something else, right? So, you know, I think there's just an evolution that's coming really, really fast. But like a lot of people are scared when I'm just super Excited, because don't you see, our roles are finally going in a direction where we're outsourcing what we hated doing anyways, right? Sitting in meetings, taking notes, doing spreadsheets like nobody. Maybe there are people that like that, but like most people don't. We're just getting into a place where we're rewarded for what really matters, like clarity, judgment, thinking. We're actually going to be paid to think longer and ponder longer because the longer idea simmers and gets broken down, the better. Because building it is going to be an instant, right? It's going to be like this. It's just a matter of you having so much clarity around it. Because guess what? If a tool is super powerful and you give it a wrong input, the output's gonna suck as well. That's why I never become good enough at cloud code, I feel, because I don't start my projects with enough clarity and the tool is so powerful that I just misdirected completely from the get go and I was like, oh shoot, this is not what I wanted to do. So that's why I still see myself being good at like using tools that are a little bit on the exploratory, prototyping path more than like on the path that, you know, elite engineers will use, for example.

I love your optimism and excitement about this stuff. I think for a lot of people say they're current software engineers, PM designers, there's a lot of fear about the future of their careers. Are they going to be relevant? Will my software engineering skills disappear? So to follow the story a little bit, if you were to give someone advice on which skills you think will be most valuable, where AI will take on more and more this kind of momentum you're seeing of where AI is filling in more and more gaps, what would your advice be of what you think people should focus on what will continue to be valuable in the future?

Yeah, emotional intelligence for sure. Just understanding human nature, real life stuff. I think we're all going to get so tired of everything fake. Fake images, fake posts, fake profiles, fake this, fake that, fake videos, everything is becoming fake and AI generated. I think humans just craving humans naturally are going to want to do live stuff more. So anything human to human is going to be a big thing to skill up on. Understand the dynamics, anything. Regarding math, if it's a math problem, I think Peter Theo said it recently, like people that just do math stuff, you know, AI is going to come for you. Like anything that's very deterministic, meaning X input equals Y output and it's pretty clear. The, the line is pretty clear. AI got. Got you eaten for lunch, right? But if you understand how X to Y goes in human dynamic, human relationship layer, I think that's where things are going to become good. So if we translate it again to a specific skill, I'll say it again. Good design. Really good design. Great design. Like how. How ny design. That's images, fonts as well. Copy. Copy is a big one. Like, we all. Now we're, we're like two years into AI. I'll bet you, me and you, if people put 10 pieces of copy in front of us, we could tell what's AI and what isn't in like three seconds. And we're only a couple of years in. So, like, really good copywriting is going to be a very good skill to have because people are just going to know after three words or three sentences that it's AI written. And even I don't read AI output anymore. I don't like just seeing it. I want that raw human experience. So I think human skills. I don't even know how to describe it because I don't think we're doing an awesome job putting labels onto what humans are good at natively. But I think we will, I think we will describe job descriptions better. We will have like human first engineers, I don't know, or human designers, or. I don't know how to describe those roles. Same way how Karpathy coined vibe coding, I was by coded before he did it. I didn't know how to call it. Like, I started vibe coding in July of 2024, and I think he, he coined it sometime in early 2025. So I was like doing it for seven months and I was teaching people how to do it for about three or four with courses. And I didn't even know how to call it, like, because there was no name. It was like, oh, I'm just using AI to. To. To do this for me.

I'm.

I don't know, whatever. So, yeah, I think we're going to reinvent some of the terms roles and whatnot. But stuff that's like human to human is here to stay. Stuff that's like, I think like, oh, you're just doing. You're a middle manager. You're a middleware person that's just translating stuff. And I can use that analogy again. Translators are going to die. People writing jokes. Comedians are not. AI is never going to be able to write a good joke. Never, never, never. It just doesn't have that layer that just doesn't understand what's funny. Like, if you ever try to use AI to write jokes, like, they're awful, they're always going to be awful. But if you use AI to translate things from one language to another, it's very good at it. Like, AI is going to replace translators, it's going to replace most journalists because it does good research, it can write good copy, whatever. Not elite journalism. It's not going to be able to replace all the writers. It's going to amplify great writers that can train AI on how to write books. So, like, somebody who's an amazing writer is going to all of a sudden write seven books a year instead of one. Right. So that's dangerous. If you're an average writer, be careful. There's zero comedians being replaced. Zero. And that's just my personal belief, like, AI is never going to write good comedy. It's impossible. And like, so try to find your analogy in your industry. Like, I just gave you one for writing skills, so to speak. So writing jokes, super good skill to have. Translating, I'm sorry to say, but, like, you're not going to have a job for much longer. Like, you better find something else to do. But yeah, that's how I look at it.

The comedy piece is interesting. I had one of the founders of the data labeling company, I don't know if it was Merkor or maybe Surge, and he said that I think it was anthropic, hired a bunch of National Lampoon comedy writers to help them train models. And so they're working on it. So I love this strong prediction he made. I'm so curious in a year to look back and be like, he was completely right. Or, no, they got that one too.

I'll be wrong on 95% of the things I said today. Three months from now, that is the only thing I can say very, very confidently.

Yeah, that seems right. Okay. So speaking of career, so one interesting career option is to do what you're doing. As you said, this is a dream job for you. It's a dream job for so many people. What, what is the kind of your path to this job and what do you think it takes for someone to actually do this as a profession?

Well, my personal path and personal journey was anything but linear. Like, I've done so many things in life, like blue collar jobs, looked at, even at Subway while I was studying and stuff like that. Like, I'm an engineer by trade, but not a software engineer. I'm a forestry engineer. So no coding. But still, engineering is Engineering, I feel you still develop certain set of skills doing that. I waited tables a long time. So you develop some human skills, you understand what people like, what they don't like. Again, blue collar jobs teach you hard work. And it's as I said, the path was not linear, but I feel almost like a Slumdog Millionaire. The movie storyline, which is like everything that happens to the character brings them into a position to be able to answer the quite the questions in the, in the quiz better. I have, I feel the same way of like I've done a lot of stuff last seven to eight years, obviously spent in startups, but doing everything but code writing. Like started in like community management, social media again, distribution matters a lot. That's something we haven't touched upon at all. Like in a world when everybody's building and there's roughly the same amount of consumers in the world, how do you get in front of the eyeballs, right. And get attention which is going to. It is the most scarce resource and it will be even more scarce. But like going back to the Bible role, if somebody's like saying, okay, well I have a pretty diverse background too and I'm vibe coding and like how do I. How does this become a job? Well, for me I feel like it became a job by building in public. I did chat with Elena once, only once on like why me? There are so many good vibe coders. I did. How did you pick me out of the crowd? And I think, you know, obviously, you know, she gave me a couple of reasons but like to translate it into like one concept. It was like I was building in public and sharing. I as I said, I made a YouTube channel and I shared all the failures and all the knowledge, all the projects that I was building. I use social media a lot. Like LinkedIn was my go to because I just have that type of cadence. As you can see, all my answers are very long and X doesn't cut it for that. You need to be very on point to be successful at X. So I'm not. So I guess it's just like build in public, share your knowledge, give away all the secrets. Like there are no secrets whatsoever. If you're sitting on a good concept, you're missing out. Let's just share it immediately if you figure something out that I recognize that very early on. And just like I think a lot of people participate in hackathons these days, I want to encourage people to do them. Like find those opportunities locally to connect with other builders. Lovable is hiring across the board. Check out our app open positions. It's as easy as that, right? Like just apply, really find companies that, that are hiring and hiring in different roles. And I've seen people do something. I'm going to give people a secret away. A couple of hires stood up by not sending resumes but sending lovable apps. They built lovable apps to show what they're, why they're good fit for a role. And we as lovable employees will always open an app that uses lovable app domain. Always. If you send me a dm, send me a lovable app. Don't send me anything long. Send me an app that tells me what you want from me or how do you see us collaborating and working together? Right. So there's people finding creative ways to get in front of eyeballs of decision makers like Elena.

Right.

And I mean skill wise again, we're just repeating ourselves here. But I think it's important to repeat it as many times as possible. Really develop good judgment.

Right.

Really understand in a deeper sense how, how things translate when live coding comes into play.

Right.

There's a company out there, I'm not going to name them but like that uses Lovable religiously. It's going to be one of our main case studies actually where like they actually hired Vibe Quarters before Lovable did. Like I'm the first official Vibe coding engineer at Lovable like with that title. But I've met people in companies where they hired them before us. People that are just Vibe coders. People that just understand that speed matters. Right. It still matters a lot to be fast. And like there's a company out there with free vive quarters full time. All they do is like translating the old code base into onto Lovable. This is bringing everything, their CRM, cms, everything that, all the tool sets that they have and they need it. There are people now actively just migrating everything, everything over. There's S&P 500 companies that are like putting Lovable in, in job descriptions too. Like saying, hey, lovable skills. Skills are, you know, recommended in the recommended tab, right? So yeah, to, to, to, to go back to the how to become Vive Quarter professionally. Well, you don't need a company to hire you. You can hire yourself as a professional live holder first. I think the reason why I clicked with Anton and with Elaine and everyone else, because I was already doing it. Like all I did, I just changed the vehicle, but I was already doing it professionally before I got hired. So that's kind of the key. Like do the job you, you would have done anyways.

What a mind expanding conversation. I love just how passionate and excited and motivated you are about all this. It feels like there's so many people out there right now that are so burnt out, I don't know, disillusioned, scared. And you're the opposite of that. You're just leaning into this, just taking advantage, taking. You're not sure where it's going to go, but following the path.

Yeah. And I don't want to interrupt you, but like, it's, it's because, like, look, lovable specifically isn't a company. You can talk about it as a company. I don't see it as a company. It's an idea, it's a mission. It's something more powerful than the Internet in my mind, because Internet allows us to consume. Lovable allows us to build. And in our nature and human nature is to build, to create. Right. And the fact that there's a tool today that you can go into and dump an idea in and something comes out of it and somebody uses it and finds it useful, to me, it's just, it's the craziest concept ever. It's my only life's dream. I had my first computer when I was six and I was convinced my whole life that I'm gonna be a software engineer or that I'm going to be building. But like, life wasn't as simple as that for me. It was very, very complicated. And Honestly, the last five to 10 years, I gave up on that dream almost. I thought, I'm never gonna build anything. I've tried, I've tried to build with technical co founders. I just couldn't find alignment. I just gave up on it. And now at 36, 30 years later, I feel like again, like that, that kid, like, I dream every day. Like I, it's, it's amazing what this enabled us to do. And I, Anybody that's scared, like, just try switches from fear to excitement immediately. Because then you see what's possible firsthand. Just go in, build something, build anything, and the, the fear goes away. You should only be afraid if you're doing nothing. If you're doing absolutely nothing. Yes, be terrified. By all means, be terrified. And then take a step towards doing something about it. And trust me, the leap is no longer as big as it used to be. It's as big as you come in and you just say what's on your mind and just ship.

I think a big part of this is just stop listening to this podcast, go just do stuff. Because you actually immediately try to. Right.

Ideally, People stop right now. They've heard enough. I gave them what I. I gave them the best that I could. Just start listening and just go.

All right, bye everyone. Okay, I'm just joking, but we shall wrap it up. I'm going to skip the lightning round just to keep this episode shorter before we wrap up. Is there anything else other than just go build some stuff? Anything else you want to say? Anything else you want to leave listeners with? Otherwise we'll let you go.

Yeah, Tech Stack doesn't matter anymore, right? It doesn't matter. Like people obsess over, oh, is this written in HTML? Is this written in React? It doesn't matter. Like it never mattered, but now matters even less. The end user just wants a stellar experience. We live in a world where anybody can produce good enough. So you, you better start learning how to produce magic because otherwise you're just going to end up in a crowd with millions and millions of others. But at the same time, if you don't know what magical looks like, don't be discouraged to start building anything and start from good enough and level up. The best way to level up, exposure time. Set aside more time on learning than building. Read the agent output, learn how it's thinking so that you know what's possible. But then also go and get inspired. Follow good designers on X. Find tools where great designs are produced and follow their creators. There's a tool where, where I'm following just the, the actual person that built it because he, he publishes videos almost daily, 40, 50 minutes long of him designing. I want to see how a world class designer does it. I want to see him talk to the tool, I want to see him prompt. And that's how I learn to become better at it. So again, exposure time. Just deliberately set more time aside to learning than coding. Because you can code fast, but you can code garbage fast as well as magic fast. It's the same amount of time. It's you and your input that matters. Forget about decisions on Tech Stack. Forget about which backend are you using, which front end are you using? That doesn't matter. Quality, taste, design, that's all you need to optimize for in the future. That's ahead of us.

Well, Zara, I think we're going to leave a lot of minds buzzing after this conversation. You blow my mind in so many ways. What a fascinating topic conversation. What a glimpse into the future. What an interesting point in time. I'm so curious just in six months where things are and revisiting this conversation. I really appreciate you coming on sharing all of this. You're awesome. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out, maybe ask some follow up questions and how can listeners be useful to you?

Awesome. Yeah, so I mentioned it already. LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me on. I'm very responsive there. If you want to follow me, I hope to re engage my YouTube channel a little bit more. I think I have a lot of cool tips and tricks that, that I want to share and teach people how to use Lovable and just Vibe code in general and level up and on how people can be useful to me. Well, you know, I'm very passionate about making sure that everybody experiences what I've experienced that day when I got my first prompt in. I envy the person that is going to try Lovable for the first time after watching this episode because the feeling is just unmatched of you going from a consumer to a builder. But in that process there's gonna be some battles to fight. I want to reduce the amount of those battles and hurdles. So if you can help me in any way, message me. What could have been better in that experience? Especially if this is your. You just watch this and you're like, I'm gonna do it. I was on the fence and I'm gonna do it. If something breaks, if something doesn't connect and relate, I need to know what that is. My job is 100% to empower you to build the best work of your life.

Right.

And you know, and I need to say this too because a lot of people may be inspired not by building or using Lovable, but, but, but rather building Lovable. Come join our team again. We're hiring across so many things. I think a lot of people should feel inspired because I hope that the energy that I bring to the table will resonate. This is how it feels working at Lovable. This is how it feels working with the best minds, the brightest minds of the world. We're not number one by accident. It's not a coincidence. The best people are gathering and we want you to be a part of it too. So if the energy and the conversation resonates with you, or if you heard about a problem today and you're like, man, I think I can solve it. Come join us. Help us build and shape the future of software development.

Incredible. And what's the site? I imagine it's just a link on Lovable's website to find the open roles. We'll link folks there. Incredible. Lazar, thank you so much for being here.

I appreciate the opportunity Bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating.

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