Vibe Thinking Is the New Vibe Coding, And It’s Killing Your Product Ideas: Is it worth it?

Before You Build That AI-Prompted MVP: Read This First

Lately (not always), I have been sitting with my morning coffee to “talk” to an AI about new products or new ideas that come to my mind. Sometimes it’s GPT 4.1, others Claude and all its models, lately GPT 5 (the weird kid that failed miserably) or Google’s Gemini models.

I think about bugs that I encounter in apps that I use daily in my workflow and see if I can discover a gap so I can develop a new product and grab a bit of market share. But my perspective is not from the system design perspective, as evidenced by my latest Google interview, which I was supposed to pass (though I failed, by the way). Or from the API perspective, as the Meta interviewers had expected, and I also failed. But from the perspective of a real user. From the point of view of a real problem, a real need, a real nuisance. Not a new feature that will make the app more “robust”, or that “frankenmonster” new feature that will let you see followers in the map and make it super creepy to open the app and like something. Sorry, Instagram. (Not sorry)

So I went for a spin with a popular text-to-speech app. And said to AI something like: “ I have this idea, I feel there is a gap, help me understand user frustrations and let’s see if we have a case for an MVP”. And off we go!

At first, the AI agent (let’s not say what “new kid on the block” was involved in the research) gives you amazingly positive and reassuring answers. “Your idea is fantastic!” or “You definitely have something here and you should take advantage of it!” or “I will draft an MVP for you. Just let me know!”. And you say to your inner self, “Hey, buddy! Not bad! You’re into something here!”

You see, accepting all the answers the AI was giving felt more like “Vibe Thinking”.

But wait: In reality, the answer was incredibly lame, generic and completely out of tone or alignment. And then I ask myself the following:

• Why would I want to compete with a behemoth that has a robust, scalable, flexible infrastructure and a team of 500 people doing development, aggressive marketing, and constantly “evolving” the product by the minute?

• Why would I, a solopreneur (as they call a humble consultant like me these days), want to go head-to-head against a product just because I woke up one day with the curiosity to fix a clear bug and used an AI agent to find reassurance and motivation?

Answering the above questions before writing my next prompt was the priority. Thinking with a critical mindset and wearing the shoes of the user and the product owner at the same time. And, after a couple of rounds of using my knowledge, experience and common sense, we ended up reducing the gap to valid points. But valid points that are not worth your effort, time and money for an MVP.

Here is where your experience and your knowledge shine

You see, accepting all the answers the AI was giving felt more like “Vibe Thinking”. These days, it’s not only Vibe coding. It feels like there’s a lot of Vibe Thinking, too. And that is fundamentally wrong, at least from my perspective. You need to be critical (and I can hear you from the other side shouting at the screen: “Obviously!”). But lately, it is not that obvious anymore, and the lines are blurring. You can’t leave the hard thinking to an AI agent that 80% of the time gives you approval and is not 100% objective (even if you ask it to be extremely objective). You can’t rely on a “generative” model to give you answers about a new product because the reality is that the model is generating the answer you want to hear most of the time, regardless of how good you are at prompting it. But more importantly, because it is you who may know best if the answer is correct, and your critical thinking comes into play.

Here is where your experience and your knowledge shine. Here is where all those years of seeing actual code, fixing bugs, creating PRDs, dealing with clients, and user needs come to the table. Here is when you remember that day when your app was successfully launched to production. Or when you stayed until 4 am with your team, trying to pass unit, integration, and e2e tests to get it out to production at 6 am and avoid rejection by the deployment team. Or when you launched your app and the next day you had tons of mixed comments on Twitter because the change you made to the UI was radical, new, challenging the status quo, and you then had to address each critique one by one with your peers. Here is when you remember hours of work and conversations with the UI/UX team, QA team, mobile team, architects, security, deployment, CI/CD, product, business folks, and stakeholders looking over your shoulder.

Before leaving money on the table by Vibe Thinking and Vibe Coding your new product, think critically.

My point of view may be naive, conservative or perhaps out of alignment with current trends, but I do know that it will take a lot of effort even to get close to the cadence you can achieve when you have great functional teams. Teams of human beings that DO have empathy for the user and are looking to solve real user problems. Not problems that an AI agent decides are latent, need urgent attention and are a clear gap that can make you the next Silicon Valley superstar (that makes me ponder why the GitHub CEO recently left.) Teams can leverage AI to enhance and give superpowers to their workflow, but it is ultimately YOU who, with your critical mindset, can make the difference. Not the AI agent.

Before leaving money on the table by Vibe Thinking and Vibe Coding your new product, think critically. Ask yourself questions, conduct user research, leverage AI to aid in your research (I believe AI models can be helpful), listen to your users, and you might end up with a clear picture of reality. Avoid embarking your team on a new adventure by building a new, shiny feature that may cause users to burn you on social media or, ultimately, leave your app for a real product made by real humans, with genuine empathy for the user.

Always open to hearing your thoughts. And yes, I am also open to new positions and projects. If you think I’d be a great fit for your team or if you’re looking to explore new business ideas, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

Oh, one more thing (hahaha), this article was written by me. No AI in the middle to generate content. Only to proofread and suggest grammar improvements or corrections. You can feel it if you read all the way to this point :)

Thank you for reading!!