Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:16:41 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:16:41] S0: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Again, in a way, I really optimize for good judgment, and part of good judgment is it comes from, again, learning how these tools work. You need to know what's possible. We talked about it, and I know I may sound contradictory sometimes, but it's because as you said, it's so interesting the world we live in, that things contradict to each other. It's an advantage not to know what's possible, but then at the same time, you cannot be completely oblivious to something that's like a factual thing. So let me talk about a failure of mine that came from being delusional. Back in the day when OpenAI started or released image generation natively in the app, so you could go to ChatGPT and be like, "Generate an image of X, Y, Z," the whole world exploded. That was the biggest thing ever. Obviously, first thing that comes to my mind is like, "I want to build a Lovable app. I just want to build a wrapper and I want to build an image gen with Lovable," without thinking that OpenAI did not release an API for that just yet. So I spent at least a week trying to brute force my way into make... ... brute forced my way into making this work instead of just waiting for another week, because a week later, they had an API and I built this app in 30 seconds. The problem was that I tried to do it when it was impossible, impossible. So I think, again, it's just a matter of really learning what's possible through communicating with the agent layer. And Lovable and all the other tools are agentic now, which means they don't just write code. They can browse the web, they can read files. They have reasoning and thinking capabilities. So that's why I'm so invested into that conversation because a lot of times it will tell me, "Hey, what you're trying to do is just undoable at the moment because of X, Y, Z." So I always use those as a learning opportunity and I just level up most by being in chat mode for planning and learning purposes. And because it just, again, develops your clarity, your judgment capabilities rather than coding capabilities.
01:19:09 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:19:09] S1: The other point you made here that I think is really important is that over time, these tools will do more and more of what you do manually. I've heard this from other people that are doing this full-time. Basically, vibe coding is just, they had all these workflows, all these files. And then Cursor adds them, Lovable adds them. And it's sad, "Oh shoot, I had this cool workflow now." But on the other hand, okay, now it's just doing all these second focus [inaudible 01:19:33].
01:19:33 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:19:33] S0: A year ago, if we had an interview, your mind would be blown. Stuff that I had to do as workarounds to address shortcomings. I built a very successful course on that with Starter Story. For a year, people were like just, "Oh my God, you're the only guy in the world that knows this secret." Now Lovable natively addresses 99% of it. I can almost say, most of the stuff that I was teaching people are, I have a YouTube channel, a little bit appreciated, but there's a seven-day learn how to vibe code with Lovable series that I did in March. Completely obsolete. None of it is true. None of it is a problem anymore. All the things that I was like, "Oh, well, this is missing and that is missing." It's not missing anymore. It's natively in the product. You don't have to work your way around it. It just works. Right? So that's why, as I say, it's the horse's analogy. I don't know if you've heard of it. A lot of people are tweeting about it, which is we started building the steam machine in 1700s. It took us about 200 years to build it. When engines got built and cars were put on the roads, I think that 90% of horse population got eradicated in the US within 20 years. The person that Tweeted this works at Claude Code. So he was like, "Now, when I translated it into AI, I was hired to do a job, technical job, technical writer, whatever. I became obsolete six months later." Humans did not get the 20 years that horses did. The guy that was hired to do a thing is like, "Six months later, I need to reinvent my role. I need to evolve it into something else." So I think there's just an evolution that's coming really, really fast. But a lot of people are scared when I'm just super excited because don't you see our roles are finally going in a direction where we're outsourcing what we hated doing anyways, right? Sitting in meetings, taking notes, doing spreadsheets. Maybe there are people that like that, but most people don't. We're just getting into a place where we're rewarded for what really matters, clarity, judgment, thinking. We're actually going to be paid to think longer and ponder longer. The longer idea simmers and gets broken down, the better because building it is going to be an instant. It's going to be like this. It's just a matter of you having so much clarity around it because guess what?
01:22:15 · Lazar Jovanovic, Lenny Rachitsky
If a tool is super powerful and you give it a wrong input, the output's going to suck as well. That's why I never become good enough at Claude Code, I feel, because I don't start my projects with enough clarity. And the tool is so powerful that I just misdirected completely from the get go and I was like, "Oh shoot. This is not what I wanted to do." So that's why I still see myself being good at using tools that are a little bit on the exploratory prototyping path more than on the path that elite engineers will use, for example. [01:22:53] S1: I love your optimism and excitement about this stuff. I think for a lot of people, say their current software engineers, PMs, designers, there's a lot of fear about the future of their careers. Are they going to be relevant? Will my software engineering skills disappear? So to follow this through a little bit. If you were to give someone advice on which skills you think will be most valuable/where AI will take on more and more, this momentum you're seeing of where AI is filling in more and more gaps, what would your advice be of what you think people should focus on? What will continue to be valuable in the future?
01:23:32 · Lazar Jovanovic
[01:23:32] S0: Yeah. Emotional intelligence for sure. Just understanding human nature. Real life stuff. I think we're all going to get so tired of everything fake. Fake images, fake posts, fake profiles, fake this, fake that, fake videos. Everything is becoming fake and AI generated. I think humans just craving humans, naturally are going to want to do live stuff more. So anything human to human is going to be a big thing to skill up on, understand the dynamics. Anything regarding math. If it's a math problem, I think Peter Thiel said it recently, "People that just do math stuff, AI is going to come for you." Anything that's very deterministic, meaning X input equals Y output and the line is pretty clear. AI has got you eaten for lunch. But if you understand how X to Y goes in human dynamic, human relationship layer, I think that's where things are going to become good. So if we translate it again to a specific skill, I'll say it again, good design, really good design, great design. And when I say design, that's images, fonts as well. Copy. Copy is a big one. We all now, we're two years into AI, I'll bet you, me and you, if people put 10 pieces of copy in front of us, we could tell what's AI and what isn't in three seconds. And we're only a couple of years in. So really good copy writing is going to be a very good skill to have because people are just going to know after three words or three sentences that it's AI written. And even I don't read AI output anymore. I don't like to see it. I want that raw human experience. So I think human skills, I don't even know how to describe it because I don't think we're doing an awesome job putting labels onto what humans are good at natively, but I think we will. I think we will describe job descriptions better. We will have human first engineers, I don't know, or human designers or ... I don't know how to describe those roles. Same way how Karpathy coined vibe coding. I was vibe coding before he did it. I didn't know how to call it. I started vibe coding in July of 2024, and I think he coined it sometime in early 2025. So I was doing it for seven months. And I was teaching people how to do it for about three or four with courses and I didn't even know how to call it because there was no name. It was like, "Oh, I'm just using AI to do this for me." I don't know, whatever.
01:26:10 · Lazar Jovanovic
So I think we're going to reinvent some of the terms, roles and whatnot, but stuff that's human to human is here to stay. Stuff that's, I think, like, "You're a middle manager. You're a middleware person that's just translating stuff." And I can use that analogy again. Translators are going to die. People writing jokes, comedians are not. AI is never going to be able to write a good joke. Never, never, never. It just doesn't have that layer that just doesn't understand what's funny. If you ever try to use AI to write jokes, they're awful. They're always going to be awful. But if you use AI to translate things from one language to another, it's very good at it. AI is going to replace translators. It's going to replace most journalists because it does good research. It can write good copy, whatever. Not elite journalism. It's not going to be able to replace all the writers. It's going to amplify great writers that can train AI on how to write books. So somebody who's an amazing writer is going to all of a sudden write seven books a year instead of one, right? So that's dangerous. If you're an average writer, be careful. There's zero comedians being replaced. Zero. And that's just my personal belief. AI is never going to write good comedy. It's impossible. And so try to find your analogy in your industry. I just gave you one for writing skills, so to speak. So writing jokes, super good skill to have. Translating, I'm sorry to say, but you're not going to have a job for much longer. You better find something else to do. But that's how I look at it.