In Part I of the series, we talked about what vibe coding is and how to figure out what you’d build (and if you should build something. Today in Part II, we’re talking about how tools, prices, and signup flows change fast and to treat the specific how-tos as current-as-of-writing and the reasoning as durable. I run a Linux server and have forgotten I ever didn’t know how. My friend Andrew Winston built and shipped Context Coach as a genuine non-engineer, recently enough to remember every place he got stuck. So we wrote this part together — my structure, his fresh scars, and his real setup list at the end as the worked example. It’s more useful than either of…
Category
Leadership
Vibe Coding for People Who Can’t Code: A five-part series. Part I — What it is, why you’d bother, and what you’d build
I last wrote code in 1980 on a TRS-80 or a Commodore 64, I forget which, but alas it doesn’t matter! Over the last two months I built three pieces of software. One of them has over 40,000 lines of code that I’ve never seen. The point of this series isn’t for you to build these. They’re mine; they fit my life; yours will be different. They’re here as worked examples — what each cost, what it taught, and what I got wrong, which turns out to be the useful part. This is the longest series of posts I’ve ever written. It’s designed for the “Vibe Code Curious” — especially people in business and leadership roles — and each part…
Where The Pundits Are Getting It Wrong – We Still Need Talented Software Engineers
There’s a narrative gaining steam in the AI discourse that goes something like this: coding assistants are getting so good that we won’t need software engineers anymore. Some version of “AI writes code now, so why would you hire humans to do it?” This take is wrong. Not slightly wrong — fundamentally wrong. And it’s wrong because it confuses three very different things. Writing Code, Building Products, and Building Companies Coding assistants write code. That’s a real and valuable capability. They can generate functions, debug errors, scaffold entire applications, and produce boilerplate at superhuman speed. No argument. But writing code is not the same as building a software product. And building a software product is not the same as building…
When is it time to fire an executive?
Sometimes when I’m mentoring an earlier-career founder/CEO, I cover a topic and think “I must have written a blog post about this, or a chapter of Startup CEO or CXO or Boards, in the past…” and then am shocked to discover later on that I haven’t. This topic is one of those topics, which came up in a recent conversation, and since sometimes the top-of-mind answer is the best one, I thought I’d recount it here. Let’s say things aren’t going well in a specific area of your company. Maybe even things have started going worse on a new leader’s watch. How do you know if it’s time to fire the leader? Worse – how do you deal with the…
Chatting with my DNA – a fascinating personal use case and a deep rabbit hole
This one has nothing to do with running a company. But it’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve done with AI, and I fell down such a deep rabbit hole that I have to share it. My friend Chad Dickerson — former CEO of Etsy, now an executive coach — mentioned that he’d uploaded his raw DNA file to an AI and started asking it questions. My reaction was something like: wait, you can do that? You can. Here’s how. If you’ve done 23andMe (or Ancestry.com — the process is similar), you can download your raw DNA data file. It’s just a text file full of SNPs — single nucleotide polymorphisms, the genetic markers that make you you. Upload…
Book Short: Incorruptible, right and timely and inspiring and depressing all at the same time
Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries is the rare business book that is the exception which proves that rule that business books should only be 50 pages long – look at the volume of dog-ears in my already-loved copy. I’ve known Eric for years, and he invited me to write a blurb for the inside cover of the book. My blurb was “Every founder eventually faces the board meeting where the mission is on the table. I’ve been in that room. Eric has too – and this book will help you walk out with your soul intact. Incorruptible is as practical as it is inspiring.” That is a good place to…
Fantasy Board: My Second Agent
I wrote my second agent — my Fantasy Board of Directors — inspired by Mike Collins, CEO of Alumni Ventures (I’m on Mike’s board). Mike had been experimenting with building AI personas of famous business leaders as thinking partners, and the concept stuck with me immediately. What if I could build a full board of advisors — people I’d never be able to recruit in real life — and use them to pressure-test my thinking? The idea got some great coverage in Fortune and Business Insider, so clearly it resonated. But what I didn’t share in those pieces was the detailed how — the construction instructions, the prompting approach, and the management discipline required to make it actually useful. Every…
Claude and Henry Kissinger, aka, Is This Your Best Work?
I was recently reminded of the great story about Henry Kissinger and work product quality. I can’t figure out if it’s true or apocryphal, but it doesn’t really matter. Here’s the version I found online, commonly attributed to Winston Lord, who served as Kissinger’s Special Assistant and later as Ambassador to China. Lord works for days on a report and submits it to Kissinger. Kissinger returns it with one question: “Is this the best you can do?” Lord takes it back, reworks it, resubmits. Kissinger returns it again. Same question. “Is this the best you can do?” This goes on — six, eight, maybe ten rounds. Finally, Lord brings back a draft and declares: “Damn it, yes, it’s the best…
Curated Reading on AI
One of the hardest things about being a CEO in the AI era isn’t the technology itself — it’s the firehose of information about the technology. There’s so much being written about AI right now that it’s almost impossible to separate the signal from the noise. Hot takes, doomsday predictions, breathless hype, vendor pitches dressed up as thought leadership — it’s exhausting. So I thought I’d do something useful and share periodically a curated basket of the most interesting reading I’ve done. Think of it as the reading list I’d hand to a fellow CEO who said, “I know I need to get smarter about AI — where do I start?” This first batch is a bit of a catch-up,…
AI won’t necessarily take your job, but someone who uses it will
AI is going to destroy a lot of jobs. Let’s just start there. White collar jobs. Desk jobs. The kind of jobs where your primary output is information, analysis, or words on a screen. This isn’t speculation — it’s already happening. But here’s the thing: the world has survived every major technological disruption in history. When the power loom arrived in the early 1800s, hand weavers rioted — literally smashed the machines — because they were certain it was the end of work. It wasn’t the end of work. It was the end of that work. New work emerged that no one could have predicted, like, oh say, the commercial mass-produced clothing industry, which had even more jobs on the…
MattBot: My First Agent
In May 2023, Fred Wilson wrote a post about being approached by a company that had trained a large language model on all 9,059 of his AVC blog posts. They wanted to offer a chatbot called “Ask Fred.” He said no thanks. His reasoning was sharp. He’s fine with anyone using his content to train AI. He put a Creative Commons license on his blog from the start. But he didn’t want a bot pretending to be him. The whole point of his blog is the humanity — the daily conversation, the thinking out loud, the relationship with readers. A chatbot that mimics Fred Wilson isn’t Fred Wilson. It’s a parlor trick. I read that post and agreed with Fred…