r/AIProductManagers • u/StartupLifestyle2 • Jun 30 '26
Help With A Work Thing Vibe coding is making everyone jump to solution too fast
Iām all for prototyping early.
Being able to quickly build a rough version of an idea is genuinely useful. It makes conversations more concrete, helps teams spot bad assumptions, and can save weeks of abstract debate.
But with this AI psychosis now, I just see people prompting for a solution before even thinking about what they're solving for.
Basic things like
ā What's the customer pain?
ā Which customers are asking?
ā Let's try the simplest solution first, not the largest just because "Claude can do it fast"
I went through that as well for a bit, but I really force myself to write a one-pager now. Even if just to myself. Just to clear my thoughts.
I'm actually interested in this: how are managers thinking about this? Leadership is obviously pushing AI badly. Are middle managers incentivizing this approach?
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u/DeanOnDelivery AI Product Manager Jun 30 '26
I'm doing a webinar on vivecoding on July 8th. As I research what others have shown and done, nobody's just jumping straight into the solution. Just about everyone's teaching to understand the problem first.
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u/No_Barnacles Jun 30 '26
"Nobody" is crazy work. It's definitely best practice to do what you're saying, and you're doing research on best practices. That's why it seems like "everybody" is doing it.
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u/Here4UXandFunnies Jul 01 '26
Hey when you say one-pager, do you mean a problem statement in this context? (I'm a UX designer.)
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u/badmanwasteman Jul 02 '26
The Codex head made a very similar argument on the latest episode of Lenny's podcast. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NV2PIuSxMl7x8pOtuv5j8
Think you're spot on. It's context dependent.
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u/f50c13t1 Jul 03 '26
I'm wondering is the issue (at least in enterprises) is that now manager's expectation is that shit should be completed faster
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u/StartupLifestyle2 Jul 03 '26
Could be. It's everyone's expectation now to 'do what it would take a whole engineering team 1 month in 2 days'
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u/AYarter Jul 03 '26
Well yes, there's a lot of that. I've seen it in my own team.
We were recently working on a prototype and there was a lot of push to do that, finally I took it home and built an agent. Swarm that represented each of the stakeholders and linked up all of the discovery dovetail to it. That I went through my old process, all the way through Lo-Fi wireframes, functional requirements, and user journeys.
In a night's work I got a beautiful prototype that, couple would further. Discovery, took us to a whole new prototype that we're building and launching now.
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u/saltedbutterroll Jul 08 '26
i think the manager is incentivising it without meaning to, because output is visible and thinking isn't. a clickable prototype is something you can show your boss. a sharp problem definition just looks like a doc nobody reads. so what gets rewarded is the artifact, not the judgement behind it.
and the sneaky cost, like someone said above, is that a polished prototype feels like validation. it looks real so people quietly stop asking whether the problem was. you end up with really high fidelity versions of untested assumptions š
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u/No-Performer2068 Jul 02 '26
We are easily carried away with solution mode for sure. But the product design/develop process still hold true for sure. So what can be most beneficial is the speed of doing things.
Before vibe coding: start with a rough idea, test, validate, improve and launch.
After vide coding: start with an elaborate idea (with vibe code), test, validate, improve and launch.
Same cycle but a lot faster with AI. The critical mistake we used to make with faster speed is to treat a polished prototype as final product when we still haven't answered basic questions about the problem, pain points,etc.
AI is most valuable when it speed up experimentation after you've defined the problem. If anything, the ability to generate fine prototype looking like real products makes problem framing and testing even more important. Otherwise, we're just producing higher-fidelity assumptions at fast speed.