Test-n-Tell - tiny apps, Big ideas

  Nir Eyal’s Hooked made a huge impression on me. It shaped a large part of how I think about product creation. Not because I wanted to “hook” users at any cost, but because the book made one thing very clear: if you understand how to influence behaviour, you also become responsible for how you use that power.

  I have been using Codex more and more recently. Not in a “look, AI wrote me a todo app” kind of way. More like: I need to ship my actual product, fix real bugs, improve real tests, and not spend my evenings arguing with a robot about why it deleted half of my codebase.

  An AI agent is like a super obedient engineer. It does whatever you ask. It rarely challenges you. It rarely pushes back. It rarely says: “This is a bad idea.” And if it goes off script, well, that’s probably because your instructions were too vague. Finally, executives got what they always dreamed about: a builder who simply builds.

The job of a product manager is already changing. We use AI more and more in our daily work, and there is no sign of this slowing down. Writing, research, analysis, prototyping, summarising calls, checking requirements, preparing strategy docs, testing product ideas - all of it can already be supported by AI.

  A mistake many companies make when hiring Product Managers is that they overvalue industry knowledge.

  When I started vibe coding, I had a budget in mind. I knew I needed to learn a bunch of new AI tools, and that would cost something: subscriptions, hosting, third-party tools, APIs. And it did cost me a bit… then a bit more… and finally a lot more. So here’s me sharing a few things I learned (and paid for) so you don’t have to.

  There’s a persistent myth in product development: that what you ship is the roadmap. In reality, what you ship is the organisation that built the roadmap.