Don't Learn Vibe Coding: How AI changed the way I think, design, and build
Hello!
Don’t Learn Vibe Coding
How AI changed the way I think, design, and build.
Feridoon “Doon” Malekzadeh
Product designer. 20+ years of shipping.
I make things.
Now I can make more things.
I didn’t become an engineer.
AI extended my reach as a designer.
AI removed a lot of the distance between what I can imagine and what I can make.
At first, I thought the trick was prompting.
Spoiler: the crossed fingers were doing most of the work.
AI is better at instructing AI than I am.
What I’m better at is explaining what I want… my objective.
Objective Driven Building
Start with the outcome, not the implementation.
Prescribe the implementation. Describe the widget, the file, the fix.
- The problem
- What I know
- What I believe
- What I’m unsure about
Don’t just give AI directions.
Use it to expand your skills, knowledge, and thinking.
“Challenge me.”
“What assumptions am I making?”
“What am I missing?”
“What don’t I know that I don’t know?”
“Is there a better approach?”
“What do you need from me?”
Do you understand?
I critique AI’s understanding before I critique its work.
Things I learned by screwing them up first.
- 01Building before thinking.
- 02Believing a bigger prompt would solve everything.
- 03Letting AI fill important gaps with assumptions.
- 04Waiting too long to establish design rules.
- 05Building features without considering the larger system.
- 06Changing five things at once.
- 07Trusting “fixed!”
- 08Not committing before doing something stupid.
Plus a 1,000 other things.
So what does this actually look like?
So I applied for a job at Wyze.
The brief was… ambiguous.
So I decided to show them what I thought they needed.
Before I built anything, I developed a point of view.
No inside information. No roadmap. Just public information and a hypothesis.
The idea wasn’t another camera feed.
It was a home that could help you understand what happened.
The interface would be the visible edge of that system.
Then I gave AI what it needed.
- Strategy
- PRD
- Requirements
- Conceptual model
- Screenshots
- Information architecture
- design.md
- Brand and visual rules
- References
- TRD
- Constraints
- Existing patterns
- Implementation plan
By the time I asked AI to build something, we had already done a tremendous amount of design.
Never Wonder
The first draft was only as good as the thinking and context behind it.
The prototype isn’t the interesting part.
The compression of the design process is.
Research. Insight. Strategy. Systems. Design. Build.
One person. A couple of days.
So what actually happened here?
Define the idea.
Define the system.
Define the build.
Plan before you prompt.
Get clear about the problem, the objective, and what good looks like before asking AI to make anything.
The blank prompt box isn’t the starting line. Thinking is.
Think systems before surfaces.
Give AI the context and guardrails it needs to create something coherent — and keep it coherent.
Avoid AI drift.
Think future before feature.
AI works locally.
You need to think globally.
Don’t paint yourself into a corner just because AI made the corner really easy to build.
AI MADE BUILDING EASY.
IT MADE JUDGMENT CRITICALLY IMPORTANT.
When execution gets cheap, deciding what deserves to exist matters more.
JUDGMENT IS YOUR JOB.
Is this a real problem?
Are my insights right?
Is this actually a good idea?
What am I missing?
Does the work hold together?
Will this scale?
Should it exist at all?
Those aren’t coding questions. They’re design questions.
AI is an amplifier.
What you know matters.
- HTML
- Components
- States
- APIs
- Databases
- Authentication
- Git
- Front end
- Back end
Every little bit I understand gives AI something to amplify.
DON’T LEARN TO VIBE-CODE.
LEARN TO BUILD.
The creativity unlock.
I couldn’t make all of this before.
Now I can.
That’s what excites me about AI.
DON’T LEARN TO VIBE-CODE.
LEARN TO BUILD.
Vibe-coding might get you started. Building is what gets you somewhere.
The tools will change. These things will stick.
Questions?
Happy to go deep on process, tools, or the Wyze build.
Thank you!
Feridoon “Doon” Malekzadeh · doon@malekzadeh.net