Everyone is Using AI for Vibe Coding, but What You Really Need is Vibe UX

As someone with a background in both Software Development (but with poor coding skills) and UX Research (but with poor UI skills), AI has been a game-changer.

Much like everyone and their mother, I can launch a front-end application in a matter of minutes, and delegate all the "hard" work to the latest AI model so that I never have to touch a line of code, without having to design a single interface, page, or button.

But when it comes to creating your own product, is this really the "hard" work?

As a UX professional who has for years exclusively dealt with the research part, a good 90% of my job consisted in (politely) telling other people that their ideas were sht and the other 10% trying to prove why their ideas were sht. You can create the most beautiful, efficient, well-coded app in the world, but if the initial idea is sh*t, or if you are trying to solve the wrong problem, or if you are building with the wrong audience in mind - nobody is going to use it, and all your "hard" work will be for nothing.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of "vibe coding" tools targeted at wannabe entrepreneurs out there that market themselves as "turn your idea into a working prototype in 10 seconds"... the issue? Very few people have good ideas and even fewer decide to test them BEFORE they start creating anything.

My absolute favourite task as a UX researcher was being asked to do research for things that did not exist yet. Something that does not have a product nor a prototype, at best a series of post-its on a wallboard. Now THAT's how you design a succesful product.
Step 1: Pick a problem OR a target audience.
Step 2: Decide which problem you want to solve for which target audience.
Step 3: Research research research.
Prototyping doesn't come after AT LEAST step 4.

And if you don't have access to your target audience, research won't be as effective. But there's something that we UX people and service designer sometimes do: we sit at a table, brainstorm, and co-create. We talk to experts who KNOW the audience. We exchange and challenge and improve our own ideas so that we don't just create something random.

So now that I am "indie hacking" on my own, and that AI does all my coding, all my front-end, all my UI. What am I to do?

I can share all my amazing ideas with someone (allegedly) smarter than me, who (allegedly) knows my target audience better than me, and ask it to tell me why MY ideas are sh*t.

I can ask AI to actually provide me with my customer segments, personas, business canvases, problem statements, and product requirements. It can do that, and then I can just feed all of those back to it to actually build something useful.

I cannot think of a good term for this delegation of the service design process. But it's what comes before "vibe coding" and what will make you stand out from 99.99% of the other amazingly-undervalidated-idea-turned-shitty-web-apps out there.