The Last 10% (Or Why Vibe Coded Projects Fail)
I saw a post today of someone who’d spent 45 minutes making a super cool home page for their website. The post ended with “Now I just need someone to help me integrate this with my website, the last 10%” To which I respond with the souther adage “Bless your heart” because you, person who posted that, are an idiot.
An idiot in the sense of ignorant, not that you as a person are an idiot, I’m sure you’re great. But here’s the reality of building products, as someone who has been building products for 14 years and currently is CEO of a company that 7,000 businesses rely on for their lead generation, meaning our product is a critical component of our customers’ business growth and if it didn’t exist or went down, that would be a huge problem.
The last 90% is actually 50% of the problem.
In product development there are two things that matter.
The design, user experience, and functionality match customer expectations.
It works, all the time, on every device.
Everything in the middle is what AI can do. It’s obvious and relatively simple. The first part requires a deep knowledge of the audience and customer, to be able to design in a way that matches what people want. The second part requires someone who is extremely detail-oriented and thorough with their testing. Which is a whole skillset in itself.
The roles are shifting with AI, the middle layer of just coding up something that’s already designed goes away. But the first part of figuring out what to build, what not to build, and how it should function, stays. And the second part, of making sure it works, is relatively unchanged.
