Vibe coding does have its limits

Plus using LLMs as a people manager

Author

Ted Goas
May 29, 2025

🔖 What I’ve been reading

Building on my last issue about how designers should code, vibe-coding is a good start. In my mind, the ultimate goal is for every designer to be comfortable touching code. Julie Zhou adsadas

Conversational UIs are great at quickly getting to the first 70%, but suck at offering easy controls over narrower areas for iteration. [...] Sometimes, it’s faster to click on a button and rapidly change the button radius from 10 to 12 to 16 just to see how it’ll look.

Julie Zhuo

We don't need to write a whole feature, but we should be able to change that button radius if there's no button to click. This has been my experience so far: Ai for getting a working prototype quickly, hand-coding or button-pressing to tweak the details.

This also relates to Nan Yu’s post about Ai adoption: LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are powerful by themselves, but only offer a text box to interact with them. This is steep learning curve for many.

Tools like Cursor, Granola, and v0, essentially wrappers to the Ai doing the “real” work, provide a familiar interface to these products, allowing more people to adopt Ai.

Sometimes you just need a button to press.

If you’re anything like me, you want to learn about Ai but feel a bit overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. What does “using Ai” actually look like?

So I did what any normal human being would do:

webcomicname.com comic of someone sitting down the learn an activity, they pick upa book, which says they're not doing the activity

Classic Ted move right there.

Thankfully one of the resources I found was the How I Ai podcast.

I’ve only listened to two episodes so far (Using GPTs as a people manager, Using Ai to get designers into code), but they have been remarkably tactical and actionable. Seeing people using the actual tools, the actual prompts they use, and how they mold a subpar result from the Ai into something usable… It’s all incredibly helpful to see.

My main takeaway: Ai never gets it right on the first time. Everyone struggles to get Ai to do what they actually want it to do. We just have to stick with it.

It’s helped me create a prototypes in Windsurf and create my first Gemini Gem (Google version of a GPT).

Would highly recommend listening on the computer or tablet, as there’s a lot of screen-sharing that’s helpful to see.

I’ve been binging Hardik Pandya’s blog and his article on lead designers struck a chord.

What’s interesting is that he doesn’t talk about things like “Being good at design” or “taking on larger projects”, but rather things like accountability, ownership, and citizenship.

I particularly liked what he describes as guardianship:

They act on the operating principle of ‘Define & Defend’ – first define a principled ethos of what good design means for their org, communicate it well across the board, and then actively defend it. They actively communicate this ethos so that it’s thoroughly ingrained in the org in a way that maximises alignment of stakeholders.

Hardik Pandya

We’ve all been there. A project’s scope increases but the deadline remains the same, and it becomes tempting to cut corners on quality. A strong designer can detect these situations and work with their team to ship something and upholds the team’s quality bar.

In other words, a good design lead not only ensures sh*t gets done, but that it’s actually good.

Five Attitudes Towards Climate Change breaks down society’s response to climate change and how each influences who gets power and what actions (or inactions) are taken.

"AI-first" is the new Return To Office. Anil Dash telling it like it is.

Almost all new homes in England will be fitted with solar panels during construction by 2027!

Germany just installed the world’s first 15MW Vestas turbine. One spin powers four homes a day. It’s the first of 64 at He Dreiht, an offshore wind farm set to power 1.1 million households. Look at this beast:

🏛️ From the Archives

A favorite I periodically re-read.

Steve Smith’s 2013 article about creativity takes on a new meaning in 2025. He argues that having a brilliant idea isn’t enough for designers, that they need to understand the problem and execute on it with discipline to make something truly great.

Well in the age of Ai, anyone with an idea can execute something. There’s more competition than ever, so it’s never been more important to deeply understand the problem and execute on it with taste, rigor, and discipline.

❝ Nice Site

Nic Chan’s site combines a lovely pixel art design with some nice interactions, making a unique, memorable personal site.

Thanks for reading ✌️
- Ted (@tedgoas)