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Lazar Jovanovic: prediction

8 Feb 2026 Lenny's Podcast The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder)

“As you pointed out, I think PMs are the winners of AI today because they bring clarity.”

— Lazar Jovanovic

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Speaker
Lazar Jovanovic
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
8 Feb 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Oh, amazing. Okay. That is perfect. By the way, I want to talk about how you unblock yourself because there's a whole other series of tips you have there, but I just want to reflect on... It's so interesting how, one, you're kind of from first principles, learning how to build product as a PM, as an engineer, as a designer, and you're figuring out a workflow where AI is helping fill in all the gaps that you don't have for as an engineer, as a PM helping you craft PRDs and design. So I think that's so interesting. It's interesting that these functions still work and are necessary. Now it's you and AI help create all this, basically, this triad that's always existed, product manager, engineering and design. And something I've always thought is that there's this question of which background will be most valuable in this future. Is it a PM? Is it an engineer? Is it a designer? My mind has always been the PM function is like their job is clarify, figure out what to build, clarify what to build, be really clear about the requirements, figure out what success looks like. It feels like that's where the skill is most needed. There's also a design component of like, make this look awesome. And I feel like that's going to be an emerging... The value of that being really good at design and taste and judgment is only going to go up. Before we get to things you've learned about to unblock yourself, because a lot of times, things don't go in the right direction, there's a bug. Without being an engineer, what do you do? Before we get there, is there anything else you wanted to share around, just tips for being successful? If we measure success in the right terms, again, AI, as you pointed out, regardless of your background is an amplifier. So if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to produce garbage faster. One thing, again, I just want to double down on is in the old world, good enough was good enough. Right? Because even producing good enough was not easy. Right? 10 years, 15 years ago, just producing was more than plenty, more than good enough. You built a SaaS, who cares how it looks like? It works. It does stuff [inaudible 00:57:42]. "Oh my God, I'm so much more productive." Today, if good enough was here, let's visualize it for people. If this was pretty bad, could be better, mediocre, good enough, world-class, if this was the gap between good enough and world-class, well, guess what? The gap is now this, because everybody produces good enough with AI. Absolutely everyone does it. So now, learning and optime it for, how do I produce world-class and magic, is the key lesson to take away today. As you pointed out, I think PMs are the winners of AI today because they bring clarity. If I was a betting man, as they say, I'd bet that the next class that wins are designers. Because we're training these tools to be more clear, to be better, to make better technical decisions. I don't think we will train them just yet to make better emotional decisions. And I think design is all about emotion and that's where the level of the skill up needs to come. That's the biggest level up. If you ask me, like, "Oh, what is the main thing you figure out when you joined Lovable? What's the biggest personal upskill?" Let's say, working with Felix, Nad, Abby, all of the people that are designers, just really what moved and shifted the needle for me. I'm like, "Oh, so this is how world-class looks like and this is what it takes." Right? I always use the analogy of like, I wanted to steal one of their designs and bring it into my Lovable project. So I went into Figma and I was like, "Let me just take this background and just put it in there." I went in and realized that what could be interpreted as a pretty simple or rather simple gradient, took 50 different layers to produce. So I clicked on that component. I was like, "Oh my God, this is not three colors. This is 50 colors." And not just 50 colors, 50 colors with different gradients of levels of opacity. So I was like, "Oh, okay." And that's the big disconnect that I've had all along. So again, if I'm answering your question directly of like, "Okay, what are some of the other tricks? What are some of the other things?" Design. Guys, just expose yourself to exquisite designs. Follow Felix from Lovable. He has an amazing newsletter. And learn how to prompt for a good design, learn about design styles. I didn't know what Bauhaus meant or glass morphism. I had no idea. So I built an app as well for that in Lovable. I was like, "I needed to build an app to learn these styles." So now, it's public. Anybody can see it. at Bauhaus meant or glass morphism. I had no idea. So I built an app as well for that in Lovable. I was like, "I needed to build an app to learn these styles." So now, it's public. Anybody can see it. It's like some UIstyle.lovable.app. I don't know what it is. It has 18 different styles and prompts to replicate them. So learn what good design means, learn all the design styles, learn how to prompt to get them is probably what I would optimize for at this stage. Yeah.…

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