I like writing for nerds but increasingly, I like writing for vibe coding founders. This year I've worked on 3 different vibe-coded apps and have been genuinely impressed with what I've seen. Most of them could've saved a lot of headache, pain and monies if they followed the instructions below... brianjenney.medium.com/the-v…

I'm going to teach a bunch of business owners how to build and deploy a website. I do NOT want them learning to code or accessing Git. What's the simplest platform to launch a site? To me, it's Vercel. Render is pretty simple too. Any normie-friendly platforms I should use instead?

I made fun of vibe-code-clean-up specialists and boy was I wrong. Af. The most challenging project I've worked on so far this year is a vibe-coded app that's been launched and has paying customers. 1. No history in git for a LOT of changes that just got written directly on a box 2. So many markdown files "explaining" how this works... that conflict with one another 3. No type-safety 🥲 4. YOLO migrations with no schema history or ability to easily rollback 5. Staging? What's that? 6. Tests? What are those? It's an amazing product and vibing out the the MVP was the correct choice. Now it's my mess to clean up. Overhelmed but excited.

AI skills companies are hiring for: RAG, agents, evals AI skills developers are learning: Claude, Codex, skills and harnesses TBH - both buckets of skills are valuable but there's a lot more leverage in the first one. If you have the skills in bucket #1 and live in SF - DM me. I may have a role for you.

I prefer the blue-haired liberal version of the tech community over the right-wing bootlicking phase we’re in now 🤷 Never fit into either honestly, but at least one FELT less evil.

Worried you’re losing your coding skills because of AI? Don’t. You probably weren’t very good to begin with anyways. ❤️ 🥰

Hiring in the SF Bay Area is hard af. I'm a software dev with access to FDE and AI engineer roles in the bay area. (also mobile/fullstack) (also Austin/NY) All I'm looking for is someone who: 1. Lives in area and can go to an office sometimes 2. Builds agents, knows RAG and has shipped 1 or both 3. Isn't weird... no disrespect yo 4. Knows how to code with and (importantly) WITHOUT AI 5. Likes a big fat bag Degrees and certs don't matter. DM me but please, understand I'm taken and my feet pics are more than you can afford.

It feels like Claude is approaching Github Actions levels of uptime.

On this season of LinkedIn Lunatics: AI bro replaces his entire dev team with AI. Discovers why engineering teams exist. Five-product indie hacker explains how software engineers are obsolete. Struggles to reach $1K MRR. Junior developer declares coding solved. Cannot find job. CEO of a company with one employee teaches you how to scale an organization. LinkedIn influencer who has never worked as a software developer explains exactly how to become a software developer. VC announces that SaaS is dead. Invests in SaaS company. Founder ships 47 AI features. Still looking for first customer. Will the AI slop continue? Will anyone actually make any money? Will a software engineer be hired? Find out this season on… LinkedIn Lunatics.

Nuanced opinions do not go viral. The person telling you, “Don’t look at the code. Trust the agent,” is correct. The person telling you, “Human review is still necessary. Verify every line of code,” is also correct. The person telling you AI has made them 10x faster is correct. The person telling you AI-generated code is creating a mountain of technical debt is also correct. These statements only sound contradictory because we keep pretending everyone is working in the same environment. We're not. Before you take blanket advice, or worse, parrot what influencers are saying online, consider looking at the context they’re working in.

Anyone still using Notion?

The best developers I ever worked with all happened to be excellent communicators. I think in this current era, the ability to articulate yourself will be even more valuable.

Build + Deploy a site with Claude Code. For Vibe Coders and Non-Coders who want to take an idea and actually launch it while avoiding the most painful pitfalls. Free AF. luma.com/onkv5yk8

I’m thinking about banning Claude code at Shopify until they change their mind and read AGENTS.md and .agents/skills etc. Insisting on only reading CLAUDE.md sometimes leads to split brain problems when different team members use different tools. Just unnecessary.

If you're a Vibe Coder, I honestly don't think you need to learn to code. BUT you absolutely should save yourself some pain and headache by asking your agent to walk you through the following things, roughly in this order: • Git and Github and what branches are for • staging vs prod vs local • accessibility and screen readers • e2e vs unit vs integration testing and the testing pyramid • KISS • evals • CRON jobs • Auth • OWASP • SDLC • Prompt injection • Pros and cons of Vercel vs AWS vs Render vs {{insert_popular_cloud_service_provider}} • Why should I be using Typescript? I'm currently working on 2 impressively vibe-coded apps and speaking to more non-technical founders who are building with AI who could've benefited from this simple list. What did I miss?

Struggling to think of a time I’d need to use Fable over Opus. Is anyone really using Fable as their default model?

A lot of AI engineers who don't know: - structured outputs - reranking - metatdata filtering - evals - tool-calling - sparse vs dense vectors - chunking strategies - temperature - human-in-the-loop -ReAct Companies aren't paying 250K+ for you to just build a chatbot bucko.

Surprising number of business owners who make money hang out on Facebook. Surprising number of people pretending to make money hang out on Instagram.

Just read through 13 real Forward-Deployed Engineer job postings that I have access to and fed the JDs to Claude. 𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲'𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗺𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿: 1. 𝗥𝗔𝗚... but not just like, embedding text. Chunking, re-ranking, evals. Can you improve the retrieval quality and/or set up the initial pipeline? 2. 𝗔𝗴𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀. Importantly - not a happy-path demo that falls apart or can be easily prompt-injected. What frustrates me is hearing that agents are "easy" to build. 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂'𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁, I assume you've never built an agent that does anything remotely complex. 3. 𝗔 𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝘀𝗶𝗱𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀*. This surprised me in a really god way. The single most repeated phrase across all 13 postings. Side projects were actually welcome for most of the roles I looked at. Having a project was more common than any framework, language, or cloud provider. 𝗡𝗼𝘁-𝘀𝗼-𝗴𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁-𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 1. Almost every one of them is 5 days a week in office. Redwood City, DC, NYC, SF. 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝘁𝗲. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵. 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 𝟮𝟬𝟬𝗞+ 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗜𝗖 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀. 𝗘𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗸𝘀 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲𝘀? 2. One requires Pentagon-level clearance and US citizenship, no exceptions, for half the team. 3. 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗯𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝟵𝟵𝟲. Not going to sugar-coat it: I no like. Dis bad. No good. Big pay with .1% equity != "owner" If you're wondering what to learn in order to apply for FDE roles, I would focus a lot less on frameworks and much more on building workflows that incorporate RAG, vector databases, agents, evals and observability layers.

Does every business ad on the main street in your town look like this now? Ya know, @canva isn't that hard to use.