TL; DR: Vibe Coding for PMs — Food for Agile Thought #509
Welcome to the 509th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 40,501 peers. This week, Aatir Abdul Rauf highlights the rise of vibe coding for PMs as a core skill, offering 23 tips from prototyping to tool chaining. Arbaz Surti reflects on GPT-5’s turbulent launch, urging PMs to prioritize empathy, transparency, and careful rollouts to preserve trust, and Audrey Xu Leung stresses that experimentation succeeds when rooted in ethical, data-driven cultures of curiosity. Jing Hu explores the AI Enthusiasm Paradox between novices and experts, while Ethan Mollick examines Mass Intelligence reshaping trust, expertise, and work.
Next, Ian Vanagas offers nine lessons for building AI features, from guardrails to continuous evaluation. Teresa Torres shares how simple evals and tracing improved Product Talk’s Interview Coach and reinforced discovery habits. Steve Newman cautions that, despite GPT-5’s progress, agentic AI remains far off. Also, Seth Godin suggests creatives either walk away with slower, deeper work or dance with AI tools, and John Cutler maps nine organizational design patterns and strategies to navigate them.
Lastly, Ron Jeffries warns that overreliance on LLMs erodes learning and true ownership of solutions. Pim de Morree shares how Liip’s pay transparency and Hypoport’s role clarity shape authentic self-management; Brian Balfour highlights sudden product market fit collapses triggered by AI shifts, leaving incumbents scrambling, and Addy Osmani distinguishes vibe coding from disciplined engineering, stressing reviews and tests for quality. Finally, Jenn Spykerman cautions that most AI pilots never scale, urging leaders to measure real production ROI.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: Vibe Coding for PMs
: Vibe Coding 101: 23 practical tips to build functional prototypes
Aatir Abdul Rauf argues that vibe coding is becoming core for PMs, predicts widespread assessments, and shares 23 practical tips for functional prototypes, spanning planning, sharp prompts, authentication, APIs, debugging, n8n backends, and tool chaining.
🎯 Product
(via Mind The Product): What the GPT-5 launch teaches product managers
Arbaz Surti leverages OpenAI’s turbulent GPT-5 launch to demonstrate to product managers the fragility of user trust, the importance of transparent change communication and strong rollouts, and how empathy and speed influence crisis recovery and long-term loyalty.
(via Amplitude): Experimentation Is a Culture, Not a Task
Audrey Xu Leung argues that successful experimentation is less about tools or tests and more about embedding a data-driven, ethical culture where analytics, iteration, and curiosity fuel continuous learning, resilience, and sustainable growth.
: How I Designed & Implemented Evals for Product Talk’s Interview Coach
Teresa Torres shares her journey designing evals for Product Talk’s Interview Coach, showing how error analysis, tracing, and simple evals create feedback loops that improve AI coaching quality and support continuous discovery practices.
(via PostHog): What we've learned about building AI-powered features
Ian Vanagas distills nine lessons for AI features: pick proven patterns, validate narrow problems, wire rich context and routing, add guardrails and monitoring, avoid knowledge silos, prioritize speed, and continuously evaluate impact with data.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
: Who Loves AI Products? The Strange Psychology Behind Our AI Obsession
Jing Hu explores the AI Enthusiasm Paradox, demonstrating that individuals with lower AI literacy are more eager to use AI because they perceive it as magical. In contrast, knowledgeable users lose that sense of awe.
: Mass Intelligence
Ethan Mollick says Mass Intelligence arrives as powerful AI becomes cheap, efficient, and easy, expanding access to reasoning models and image tools while challenging trust, institutions, expertise, and everyday work.
: GPT-5: The Case of the Missing Agent
Steve Newman argues that despite GPT-5’s obvious usability gains and technical progress, true agentic AI remains distant, as experiments reveal current models still fail badly in open-ended real-world tasks and priorities.
: Experience with LLM
Ron Jeffries argues that while LLMs can produce correct code, relying on them risks losing critical learning. His experience shows that a more solid understanding and better programming skills come from deriving, testing, and truly owning the solution.
🖥 💯 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 – October 6, 2025
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Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 AI for Agile BootCamp Cohort #2 — September 15 – October 6, 2025.
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➿ Agile & Leadership
: Walk Away or Dance
Seth Godin suggests creatives facing AI disruption can either walk away by making slower, deeper, more human work worth more, or dance by mastering AI tools to amplify pace, judgment, and impact.
: Why Are We Organized Like This?
John Cutler maps nine common patterns behind org design, from politics and buzzword-driven fads to founder gravity, disciplined management, and thoughtful transformation, offering survival tips, thriving strategies, and hacks for navigating each.
(via Corporate Rebels): When Self-Management Gets Real: Two Lessons You Can Steal
Pim de Morree shares lessons from Liip and Hypoport, showing that real self-management requires more than ideals: Liip embraces radical pay transparency to build trust, while Hypoport adds clear structures and roles to prevent chaos.
📯 The AI Precision Anti-Pattern: Stop Using LLMs for Problems That Demand Correct Answers
Here's another one for your collection: The Generative AI Precision Anti-Pattern, where organizations wield LLMs like precision instruments when they're probabilistic tools by design. Sound familiar? It's the same pattern we see when teams cargo-cult agile practices without understanding their purpose.
LLMs excel at text summarization and pattern recognition in large datasets, which helps analyze user feedback or generate documentation drafts, but can they be used for deterministic tasks like calculations? If you are not careful with matching your problem to the right tool, you end up building issues of all kinds into the foundation of your product.
What can you do about it? Spoiler alert: The fix isn't better prompting, but architectural discipline and tool-job alignment.
🎓 Learn more: The AI Precision Anti-Pattern: Stop Using LLMs for Problems That Demand Correct Answers.
🛠 Concepts, Practices, Tools & Measuring
: The Hidden Cost of AI Pilots that Never Scale
Jenn Spykerman warns that 88% of AI pilots never scale, creating hidden costs from idle systems, wasted talent, and decaying expertise, urging leaders to measure ROI on production value, not pilot success.
(via Reforge): Product Market Fit Collapse: Why Your Company Could Be Next
Brian Balfour warns that AI is triggering sudden product market fit collapses, as seen with Chegg and Stack Overflow, where customer expectations spike overnight, breaking growth loops and leaving incumbents little time to adapt.
: Vibe coding is not the same as AI-Assisted engineering.
Addy Osmani separates vibe coding from disciplined AI-assisted engineering, warning that vibes suit prototypes, not production; gains come from specs, reviews, tests, and ownership to ensure security, maintainability, and quality.
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
| Date | Class and Language | City | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 February 3, 2026 | Guaranteed: HoA #71: A3 Framework — Assist, Automate, Avoid — Let’s Build a Playbook! (English; Live Virtual Workshop) | Meetup | FREE |
| 🖥 💯 🇩🇪 February 10-11, 2026 | Guaranteed: Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇬🇧 March 10-11, 2026 | Professional Scrum Master—Advanced Training (PSM II; English; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 💯 🇬🇧 March 19 to April 16, 2026 | Guaranteed: AI4Agile BootCamp #6 (English; Live Virtual Cohort) | Live Virtual Cohort | €499 incl. 19% VAT |
| 🖥 🇩🇪 March 24-25, 2026 | Professional Scrum Product Owner Training (PSPO I; German; Live Virtual Class) | Live Virtual Class | €1,299 incl. 19% VAT |
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product YouTube channel to improve learning, for example, about Vibe Coding for PMs:
- Hands-on Agile #68: How to Analyze Unstructured Team Interview Data with AI.
- Fabrice Bernhard: The Lean Tech Manifesto.
- Maarten Dalmijn: The 5 Obstacles to Empowered Teams.
- Roman Pichler: The Top Reasons Why a Product Strategy Fails.
- Johanna Rothman: How to Instill Agility, not Agile Practices.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out: Learn more about Vibe Coding for PMs — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
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If you would like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about Personal AI Productivity by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
