The perils of vibe-coding and getting faster manager approvals

Plus some good climate news 🌿

Author

Ted Goas
November 06, 2025

🔖 What I’ve been reading

I became a design so I wouldn’t have to learn business. But the reality is that SaaS is a war zone and only a few take the prize.

If you ignore your competition, you’ll get to experience capitalism in its rawest form: competitors who are more aggressive, more vicious, or more desperate than you will pillage your customers and put you out of business.

This is another good read from the folks at Stay Saasy, who break down the factors that make a SaaS business succeed or fail. This is what I mean when I advise designers to be more strategic, understanding this stuff at a high level makes us more valuable in an age where anyone can build an idea with the help of AI.

Tools like Lovable and Figma Make let anyone build software in minutes, no coding skills required. It’s great for speed, but over time this mindset risks producing a generation of developers who can produce code but can’t explain how it actually works.

If AI doesn’t literally take all the white-collar jobs over the next few years, we won’t just have a stock market bubble to deal with. We’ll have a drought of educated workers.

Lane Wagner

AI can write the code, but humans still decide what’s worth building and decide what quality looks like.Tomorrow’s developers still need a solid grasp of software engineering fundamentals

Lane’s suggestion: Turn off auto-complete, turn off AI agents, relegate AI to explaining concepts, write the code yourself, and have fun learning. Amen to that!

If you’re in a fast-paced environment (and aren’t we all these days), getting your manager’s approval often feels like it takes too much time. If the request seems simple, what’s taking so long?

Well, consider this:

Your manager’s head is on the chopping block for any negative outcomes.

Wes Kao

I didn’t fully appreciate until becoming a manager myself. Any good manager owns the outcome when their team makes a mistake. Their job and reputation carry risks that yours simply doesn’t.

Wes also offers some tips like anticipate questions they’ll ask (there’s never none, being honest about the work’s downsides, and being explicit about what you need:

I’ve listened to direct reports speak for 10 minutes, and at the end, still didn’t know what they wanted me to do. Basically, don’t make your manager think too hard just to approve your work.

Wes Kao

The strongest people on my team hit on a number of these. Their work gets approved quickest → they generally make my life easier → I trust them more → they get promoted. You can see where this goes. But again, I never realized this until being a manager, so this is an article I wish I had 10 years ago.

Despite bleak media narratives on recent climate progress, data shows the real story: emissions have nearly flatlined since 2015, coal is losing value, and 100% renewables are becoming reality. Renewables (mainly wind and solar) surpassed coal globally for the first time as coal declines across major regions.

Parcel Unpacked has been one of my favorite conferences lately. An online conference done right. It’s happening again in Feb and they are looking for speakers and soliciting talk ideas. Psst: I’d like to see how email devs are using Ai (because it’s not business as usual for us anymore).

This year is the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Despite the media’s doom and gloom spin on climate progress, warming predictions lowered to 2.6°C from 4°C. And clean energy is rapidly scaling: supplying over 40% of electricity, and outpacing fossil fuels investments 2:1, and EVs account for over 20% of new sales.

A great article on executive presence from the folks at Raw Signal Group. Leaders should care more about what work gets done and less about how it gets done.

Smashing Magazine published a lovely roundup of tools for building HTML emails. Can I Email?, Really Good Emails, Good Email Code… lots of timeless resources in there.

Dithering Explained is a beautiful visualization showing how dithering creates smoother images through smart pixel patterning.

❝ One Good Quote

I hope nobody ever screams at their phone or their computer because of what I've done. I'm sure they have, and I hate it.

💅 Nice Site

I’m lovin’ Giga’s site, which makes an incredibly complex topic (AI agents) seem approachable. Visual language reminds me of Adaline.

A screenshot of a homepage with a forst background image and head line text over it.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)