most vibe coders are building backwards
Back in 2017, I was a sales engineer at a tech company.
True story:
The Product Manager I Admired
Back in 2017, I was a sales engineer at a tech company. Not quite a real software engineer... but not just a salesperson either.
I was stuck in this weird middle ground. I pushed a few things "live" to production in my day… managed my own little set of services and scripts… stuff like that.
Basically, selling customers on use cases of our platform that were so advanced, they required technical solutions to actually implement.
(kinda like co-piloting some advanced fighter-jet, but not building the engine for it)
Anway… the company had this structure where different teams owned different pieces of our app.
For example, Team A managed the Campaign Creation piece of the platform…
While Team B managed statistics and data wrangling… ETC, ETC, ETC And I'll never forget our Product Manager for the "Automated Ads" feature.
This feature was a beast - an automated video generation system that could pump out thousands of personalized video ads.
Think: connecting a google sheet with thousands of rows into a modular video editing tool and churning out thousands of videos at once.
But here's what struck me:
The Product Manager knew EVERYTHING about it. Where it could extend to. What wasn't in scope. What was technically feasible. What would break the system. How the different pieces combined together to solve problems for customers.
He didn't just know what buttons to press... He understood the entire machine & why each piece was there.
Systems Thinking > Surface-Level Coding
Real technical impact doesn't come from surface-level functionality. It comes from systems thinking. The difference between vibe coding an actual app that people use, and a graveyard of half-finished projects? Understanding the whole system, not just the shiny parts.
Fast forward to today's vibe coding world... Most people are prompting AI like they're ordering from a drive-thru menu:
- "Give me a landing page!"
- "Build me an app!"
- "Make it look cool!"
- "Make it so that people will actually wanna buy it LOL"
But here's the thing:
Modern vibe coders need to think like that PM I admired. Not just "what can AI build for me?" But "how does this piece connect to that piece? What are the limitations? What's actually scalable? How is a user meant to experience this thing?"
When you approach vibe coding with a Product Manager mindset, everything changes.
Your AI-assisted builds go from impressive demos to actual viable products.
You stop creating technical debt. You start creating technical assets.
If you want to stop building flashy prototypes that fall apart...
And start building like someone who actually understands systems...
Then you'll want to check out my latest youtube video:
youtube.com/watch?v=arWg7gYVD_0
I walk through my complete 8-step vibe coding process that teaches you to build like an actual engineer (or product manager) would.
No fluff. Just the systematic approach that separates real builders from AI prompt jockeys.
Talk soon, Sean