The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job)

I'm the first official vibe coding engineer at Lovable.

You're at the top .1% elite level of vibe coding. It's a dream job for so many people.

It became a job by building in public. You don't need a company to hire you, you can hire yourself as a professional vibe coder first.

You've never coded, you don't [chuckles] wanna look at the code?

Coding is gonna be like calligraphy. People will be like: "Oh, my God, you wrote that code? That's so amazing!" It's gonna be so rare that it's gonna become an art.

These Venn diagrams of engineer, designer, PM, used to be very separate, now they're converging.

AI, regardless of your background, is an amplifier. If you don't know what you're doing, you're just gonna produce garbage faster.

Feels like an emerging core skill is learning clarity in the ask of the AI.

I like to use the Aladdin and the Genie analogy. You rub the lamp, a genie comes out, "I'll grant you three wishes." The first wish is, "I wanna be taller." Genie makes me 13 feet tall because I was not specific. AI just don't understand what do you mean when you say, "You know what I mean?" So you need to be specific. I'm optimizing 100% of my time today on good judgment, clarity, quality, taste. [upbeat music]

Today, my guest is Lazar Jovanovic. Lazar is a professional vibe coder. He gets paid to vibe code all day, and build internal and external products. This conversation is going to blow your mind in so many ways. This is not only a really interesting new career path for people to consider, if you listen to what Lazar shares, it's also a really important glimpse into where things are heading for tech roles. I found myself thinking more deeply about the future of product management, and engineering, and design during this chat than I have in a long time. We also spent a bunch of time on Lazar's best advice as an elite vibe coder for getting the most out of AI tools. He's got a bunch of really interesting and useful frameworks I have not heard anyone else share, that will immediately level up your success using all the latest AI tools. This conversation is going to expand your mind in so many ways. I cannot wait for you to hear it. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an insider subscriber of my newsletter, you get over 20 incredible products for free for an entire year, including a year free of Lovable and Replit, Bolt, Gamma, n8n, Linear, Devon, PostHoc, Superhuman, Descript, Whisper, Flow, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, Mobbin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Lazar Jovanovic, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Strella, the customer research platform built for the AI era. Here's the truth about user research: It's never been more important or more painful. Teams wanna understand why customers do what they do, but recruiting users, running interviews, and analyzing insights takes weeks. By the time the results are in, the moment to act has passed. Strella changes that. It's the first platform that uses AI to run and analyze in-depth interviews automatically, bringing fast and continuous user research to every team. Strella's AI moderator asks real follow-up questions, probing deeper when answers are vague, and surfaces patterns across hundreds of conversations, all in a few hours, not weeks. Product, design, and research teams at companies like Amazon and Duolingo are already using Strella for Figma prototype testing, concept validation, and customer journey research, getting insights overnight instead of waiting for the next sprint. If your team wants to understand customers at the speed you ship products, try Strella. Run your next study at strella.io/lenny. That's S-T-R-E-L-L-A.io/lenny. Today's episode is brought to you by Samsara. If you listen to this podcast, you know that we spend a lot of time talking about building things that sit on a screen: onboarding funnels, mobile apps, and checkout flows. Samsara is building products for the physical world: first responders racing to emergencies, truck drivers carrying critical supplies, construction workers building our cities and data centers. These are people who put everything on the line every single day, and Samsara's technology protects them. Samsara is solving complex problems at the intersection of hardware, software, and edge AI, and their AI doesn't just detect events, it reasons about the intent and answers questions like: Did that truck driver brake abruptly because they were distracted, or was that a heroic act? If you want to ground LLMs in messy, real-world telemetry or solve edge AI constraints at a planetary scale, Samsara wants to talk to you. If you like playing with enormous datasets, moving fast, and working in small teams, come help build the technology that makes the physical world safer and more efficient. Visit samsara.com/lenny to learn more. That's S-A-M-S-A-R-A.com/lenny. [upbeat music] Lazar, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.