At PZ, we’re always exploring how design and technology can better complement each other. We recently hosted a Lunch & Learn featuring Emma Carter, Experience Design Leader and author of DesignedUp, whose talk was a candid, experience-rich exploration of what it takes to create great products, and even better collaboration between disciplines.

A friend and former colleague reached out to me recently to ask if I could help him fix a couple of bugs in a small project he’d been working on. He was not a developer, but had worked in and around developers for his whole 20+ year career as a business analyst, product owner and program manager. With the advent of tools like Cursor and Lovable his lack of coding ability was (maybe) no longer a barrier to getting some ideas he’d been incubating in his mind for a while, out into the world. With credit card in hand, he dived headfirst into the world of “vibe” coding. We met for coffee, and he showed me the prototype he’d built. I was quite impressed with what he showed me (running on his laptop…deploying it anywhere was a bridge he had not crossed yet) – a capable working prototype that demonstrated the ideas he was trying to prove out. I asked him about the “development experience” and he said it had been great at first, and he’d been able to make a lot of progress quickly, but at some point he hit a bit of a wall where each change he tried to make introduced more issues, and he felt like it was pointless to continue. He’d switched between a few different AI coding tools in an effort to see if the problems he encountered were specific to the tool he’d started with, but without success. The vibes had run out.