I can’t keep up anymore.
There’s so much being built inside this community that deep dives on every project stopped being realistic weeks ago.

It’s a beautiful problem to have.

This publication has evolved into something bigger than a newsletter.
It's a lab now.
People testing ideas in the open, shipping real things, expanding what AI can be used for, beta testing for each other.

Everyone here is solving a slightly different problem, under slightly different circumstances. And that shows up in how they build, what they share, and what they choose not to.

I’m learning from every single person I read in this community.

Hey, I’m Karo 🤗

I’m an AI Product Manager and builder. I write Product with Attitude, a newsletter about building with AI and developing critical AI literacy through practice.
If you’re new here, welcome!
Here’s what you might have missed:
Tools I Built for This Community
Member Discounts

What’s Inside

• Why I’m shifting from deep dives to builder spotlights.

• What the new AI builder community showcase format looks like

• 8 projects across Art & Design, Responsible AI, Writing & Content, and Development Services

• Who needs beta testers right now: open calls from the PwA community

• How you can nominate someone (including yourself)

What The New AI Builder Community Showcase Format Looks Like

So I decided to test a different approach.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to spotlight AI builders in a new format, based on selected product categories.

This week we're looking at Art & Design, Responsible AI, Writing & Content, and Development Services.

The one constant in each showcase is the open beta tester calls section at the end. Every edition will include it.

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

Art & Design

AI art tools in 2026 range from generative image creation to speculative design systems. drives the main direction in this category, with two stunning builds.

Cynora Space

Cynora Space is a speculative AI art system that depicts imagined futures through interactive fragments showing possible life forms and technology. Each piece invites you to interact with a version of the future that doesn't exist yet.

Nyozzi

Nyozzi is a growing collection of interactive designs, each paired with a prompt you can copy and make yours. In a true builder spirit, Ileana is sharing these prompts free of charge.

I’m in the process of redesigning StackShelf. My new hero section will be inspired by one of these prompts.

Responsible AI

Responsible AI tools help builders define accountability boundaries, test for bias, and document where their AI system’s job ends. This category barely existed two years ago. In 2026, it’s becoming essential.

AI System Responsibility Readiness

built a guide that forces builders to define where your AI system’s job ends. Her Responsibility Readiness Check takes 10 minutes and shows you exactly where responsibility is leaking.

Judy is still incorporating feedback and invites more builders to run through it before the full release.

Writing & Content Tools for Substack

Newsletter writer tools in 2026 cover everything from drip email automation to Substack Notes scheduling to full AI content operations platforms. Three community members are building in this space right now.

Drippery

built Drippery, a standalone SaaS that lets writers set up automated email sequences without the overhead of a full marketing platform, and at a fraction of what Kit charges.

Note: Premium PwA members can enjoy 50% discount. Send me a message if you’re interested.

Subflow AI

built Subflow AI, Substack Notes automation tool that lets you write and schedule 30 days worth of Substack Notes in 5 minutes. For writers who want consistent visibility on Notes without the daily time cost, this solves a real problem.

Note: All PwA members can enjoy 10% discount. Send me a message if you’re interested.

Content Hub OS

built Content Hub OS, a full AI content operations SaaS that streamlines your entire content workflow. It’s a comprehensive build that has taken over a year, so it definitely deserves a spotlight.

Development Services

Unpromptable Assets

and built Unpromptable Assets, a custom AI development service that lets you request tailor-made automations, AI agents, and workflows built for problems only you understand.

Who Needs Beta Testers Right Now? Open Calls from the PwA Community

AI beta testers are hard to find in 2026. Too many tools launch without real user feedback. This section appears in every showcase edition to connect builders with testers from our community.

If you’re building something and need testers, the Wednesday Build Board in the Community Chat is your entry point.

AI Tool Evaluator

New AI tools launch every week. built the AI Tool Evaluator to make it easier to decide which one is worth switching to.

It addresses a real pain point: AI tool discovery fatigue, where builders waste hours comparing options that all look the same on the surface.

SplitTrack

Shared expenses are easy to split in the moment and impossible to remember a week later. built SplitTrack to close that disconnect: a simple expense tracker that keeps tabs on who owes what.
It's front-end only for now. Esha is actively looking for feature ideas.

Why Showcasing Member Work Matters

Showcasing community work matters to me because most of what people build never gets the visibility it deserves.

The AI space rewards hype over craft. We want to change that.

This is community-led growth in the most literal sense:

• The community builds.

• I showcase the builds.

• Readers see what’s possible.

• And the cycle continues.

FAQ

What is the Product with Attitude AI community showcase?
It’s a recurring series spotlighting individual AI builders from the Product with Attitude community.

Who can be featured in the AI builder spotlight on Substack?
Any member of the Product with Attitude community who is actively building with AI. You don’t need a finished product. Beta-stage projects and early prototypes are welcome.

How can I submit my project?
Two options:

1. Every Wednesday we run a Wednesday Build Board event in the Community Chat. Everyone can participate and submit their projects.

2. Alternatively, nominate someone in this community or yourself by sharing all details in the comments below.

Tools Built By Me

All of the tools I built for Product with Attitude (past, present, and in progress) are included in your Premium Membership, alongside other benefits.

You can use them from day one.

That means:

• LinkSwap: Trust-based backlink swaps with other writers.

• Vault: AI workflows, coding prompts, automation templates shared by the community members.

• StackShelf: List your own products, alongside other builders in the community. Most of the builders listed in this article promote their products through StackShelf.

You Might Also Enjoy

I Refuse To Build A Trap by
I Refuse To Let The AI Decide What My Users Need by

Before You Go

WHY SUBSCRIBE ・PREMIUM RESOURCES・TOOLS I BUILT・TESTIMONIALS ・CLAUDE HUB ・PERPLEXITY HUB

This one started with rage.

A professor on Reddit had built an elaborate trap for students: fake citations, trick questions, prompt injection.

The post radiated smugness. The comments cheered. And somewhere in the thread, the quiet part went unsaid: this person spent more time on surveillance than on teaching.

read that post and felt an urge to fix this.

We’re educators, not cops.

Since then, that single line runs through everything Sam builds.

The Builder

On Substack, Sam is the writer behind Slow AI, one of the fastest growing publications in Education, where he’s been methodically unpacking what critical AI literacy looks like since mid-2025.

I connected with Sam when he first joined, for three reasons. One, he’s brilliant. Two, he’s humble. Three, we share a mission - helping people develop critical AI literacy.

What almost nobody knows: he’s also the editor of Consilience, a poetry magazine.

Poetry is where I think most clearly about voice, authenticity, and what makes writing human.

That combination matters.

Because the tool Sam built isn’t a tech product pretending to solve an education problem, but an education tool built by someone who’s spent years thinking about how language shapes power, and how power shapes blame.

Before Substack, before poetry, Sam was writing code. He authored over a million lines of IDL and Python. Then a decade of not coding at all.

When he came back to building in January 2026, the doubt hit fast:

I hadn’t coded for over 10 years since my first postdoc. Maybe I’ve forgotten everything. Maybe vibecoding is just for people who already know what they’re doing.

This is the part that “shipped in a weekend” posts rarely include: the moment before the first try, when you’re asking yourself am I even the kind of person who builds things?

You are.

The Product

The idea behind Sam’s tool, the Integrity Debt Audit, started with months of writing and thinking about a pattern he kept seeing in higher education: AI didn’t break assessments. AI exposed assessments that were already broken.

Assessment briefs that were already boring, generic, and disconnected from real learning are now exposed by AI. And educators panicking, policing, blaming students instead of fixing the actual problem: our curricula were never that good to begin with.

Students using AI isn’t the crisis. A brittle curriculum is. AI just turned the lights on.

Sam wrote about it again and again. Still, reading changes minds slowly. Using a tool can change habits.

The tipping point was that Reddit post. An educator designed a system of planted errors, fake citations, trick questions, and prompt injection to outsmart students. But outsmarting students is not the role of educators.

He’s spent more time on surveillance than on making the assignment worth doing. That’s when I knew this framework needed to be more than a Substack post. It needed to be a tool people could actually use.

The Integrity Debt Audit lets educators upload an assessment brief, and have it scored across 10 dimensions of vulnerability to AI. Instead of pointing out if students cheated, it points out where your brief is structurally weak, and suggests how to fix it.

This is a brilliant approach. Detection doesn’t fix anything, improving the briefs does.

And it’s brilliant for another reason too.

According to my research, The Integrity Debt Audit has zero direct competitors. Every tool in the space is fighting over AI detection (Turnitin, GPTZero, Winston AI, Copyleaks).

Nobody else has built a tool that audits assessment vulnerability to AI and tells educators how to fix it. owns a category of one.

The Build

Sam’s tool choices:

• Claude for coding

• Github for source control

• and Streamlit for deployment.

In the end, the real challenge wasn’t vibecoding itself. It was figuring out what anyone needed from it.

Early versions gave scores and that’s it. Users felt attacked. I had to add context, interpretation, framing:
‘This score is normal. Here’s why. Here’s what to fix first.’
The diagnostic data was never the point. Helping people feel capable of improvement was.

That last sentence. I want to underline it twice.

Once, because helping people feel capable is a mission Sam and I share.
Twice, because this is a product insight that goes way beyond education.

Every builder who ships a scoring system, a dashboard, a diagnostic of any kind should read this:

The Nos

What Sam deliberately left out tells you as much as what he built.

• No comparison features

  Would have been easy to build, would have driven engagement, but it turns diagnosis into competition. That’s the opposite of what I want. This isn’t about league tables. It’s about honest self-reflection without an audience.

• No AI detection.

  People kept asking: ‘Can it detect if the brief was written by AI?’ No. That’s the wrong question. I refuse to build surveillance tools.

• No gamification.

  AI kept suggesting badges and streaks. Sam’s response:
  God, no. This isn’t Duolingo for assessment design.

• No corporate tone.
  AI kept suggesting I write like a policy document. I kept refusing. The tool needs to sound human, warm, on your side. Not bureaucratic.

In one of my previous interviews, refused gamification features. rejected AI suggestions that didn’t serve her non-technical users.
Now Sam, same instinct.

The Real Constraints

Like , , and me, Sam builds in stolen time.

Kids, kids, kids! My young family are super fun, but they are FULL ON.
All my coding happens in stolen 45-minute windows after bedtime or before they wake up. No long, focused sessions. Everything had to be built in small, resumable chunks.

The part that may surprise you is that the constraint made the product better.

If I couldn’t understand my own code after a 3-day break, users definitely wouldn’t get it.

For non-product folks, that’s a design principle: forced simplicity as quality filter.

Where AI Helped, Where It Didn’t

Without AI, the Integrity Debt Audit wouldn’t exist.

I don’t have time to hand-code a full web app while managing research, teaching, and family. Vibecoding let me build something real in stolen hours. Without AI, this would be a Substack post and a half-finished Google Sheet.

But AI also tried to derail the build. Constantly.

Suggesting features I didn’t need. ‘Add user authentication! Add data visualisation! Add social sharing!’ Every suggestion sounded reasonable but would have tripled the scope. I had to keep saying no.

And the scoring prompts that “sounded good but were actually too vague.” Claude would generate wildly inconsistent scores until Sam tightened the rubrics.

What still doesn’t work:

• The LLM scoring isn’t deterministic. Same brief can get slightly different scores.

• Mobile experience is rough.

• Non-English briefs aren’t supported yet.

The fact that Sam names all of this openly gains my immediate respect. No “it works perfectly” energy. No “shipped and done.” This is a builder who knows exactly where the seams are and isn’t pretending they don’t exist.

Sam’s Advice

Build the smallest version first and ship it scared. You’ll think it’s not ready. You’ll be right, it’s not. Ship it anyway. The feedback you get from one real user who actually tries your broken prototype is worth more than six months of planning. And honestly? Most people won’t even notice it’s rough. They’re just glad someone made a thing that helps them.

Three things worth underlining:

• Ship it scared. I love this! I’m officially stealing this line from Sam, it’s brilliant.

• One real user beats six months of planning. The feedback loop only starts when someone touches the thing.

• People don’t notice the rough edges you obsess over. They notice whether it helps.

  They’re just glad someone made a thing.

What We’re Learning

What if the problem isn’t students?

You can build the next AI detection wrapper. It’s easy. It’ll probably sell.

Or you can build with attitude:

• Going one layer deeper and daring to ask hard questions

• Recognizing that the problems usually have upstreams and downstreams

• Saying no to useless feature suggestions

• Building value for everyone involved, not just the buyer

I’m trying to help people understand what critical AI literacy actually is and how they can develop it without fear or blame.

How to Build with Attitude

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right NoW

• built workshop canvas for product teams to help the assess the UX strenghts and limitations of new AI features.

• built PocketHog, a native iOS app that puts your PostHog analytics on your iPhone home screen as live widgets.

• built a crossword to demonstrate a smarter way to build

  AI workflows.

• and built BMAD,

  the Breakthrough Method of Agent Development.

• launched a service for hand-drawn profile banners.

• built Carify, an AI‑powered car companion that brings clarity, confidence, and support into everyday driving.

• built a lightweight motivational tool to do one good act

  a day dailygoodbits.com.

• built a tool for aspiring novelists finish their first book:

  myamanuensis.com.

• built 7 mini apps to demonstrate that English language skills are your primary tool for building apps with AI.

• built ØRD1S, a healthcare intelligence platform

• is working on a new programming language that explores the intersection of vibecoding and natural language programming.

• is working on an AI cognitive partner called ECHO.

• built The Outcome Fairness Pack, a Notion template called designed to help evaluate AI in a more equitable and traceable way.

• built a custom GPT travel planner.

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Build AI Practice Loops So Students Get 5x The Reps Without 5x Your Grading by

Are you tempted to start building but unsure where to start?

Start here:

👉 Vibecoding Resource Hub
👉 Vibecoding Guide From 2 Builders Who’ve Shipped
👉 Claude Hub: Code workflows, Cowork setups, Skills, CLAUDE.md files
👉 UI Elements Prompt Pack

Built something already? I’ll help it get seen.

You don’t need to do everything alone. Let our community amplify your work.
As a PwA member, you can list your projects on StackShelf App: an online directory I built so your projects are discovered by readers, fellow builders, and AI. As of today, StackShelf has redirected 5,201 unique visitors to creators’ product sites.

The market’s cornered, it said. Canva and Gamma have it covered. The addressable audience is spoken for.

She built it anyway.

This wasn’t the first time she overruled her AI. It wasn’t the second.

The story of CarouselBot isn’t a story about a tool. It’s about a builder who trusts her own judgment more than her AI’s.

And it’s a story I want you to read, because critical AI literacy means evaluating AI, not just using it.

Subscribe 🤗

Welcome to the Build with Attitude Project

Why Authentic AI Development Stories Matter

I’m Karo 👋, AI product manager, builder of StackShelf.app, Attitudevault.dev and someone who believes that building value matters more than building what merely sells.

2025 feeds were flooded with “I vibe coded an app in two hours and already made $100K“ posts:

These claims aren’t just misleading; they’re actively harmful by teaching extraction over value creation.

They also skip the part where you build multiple things before you find the one that sticks. The part where a legal review kills your best idea.

So I started collecting different stories. Not stories about tools, but about how people make judgment calls under uncertainty.

I partnered with 36 builders from around the globe. Every second week, one of them walks you through how they think. Where they got stuck. What they changed. Why.

We’re all fans of vibe coding here. But we also believe in product thinking, craft, and building things that matter.

If you’re new to the series, welcome! You can find all previous interviews here.

The Builder

doesn’t have one product. She has a trail of them.

Good Bloggy was an AI writing studio with author identities and style guides. It worked and got traction. But when Karen ran Google ads, she learned that the people who signed up were students in their late teens trying to cheat on their homework.

Wrong audience. Lesson absorbed. Next.

Then I created StackDigest, a newsletter digest, discovery, and analysis tool. I built it with Django, PostgreSQL, and OpenAI embeddings for vector search across 2,000 newsletters and 30,000 articles.

StackDigest took off on Substack and many PwA readers signed up right away.

This time, however, the problem was that a legal compliance review suggested that how I was using Substack's API and aggregating data might violate Substack's TOS.

Right idea. Wrong path to market. Next.

Then FutureScan, a research tool for finding and analyzing academic papers, with over 139,000 abstracts indexed to date.

Then came the Chrome extensions:

• Substack Reader for managing subscriptions.

• Newsletter Audit (a collaboration with ) that pulls analytics into a single dashboard.

• Prompt Collector for organizing AI prompts.

That’s a curriculum.

Each build taught Karen something the next one needed, and all of them led to CarouselBot.

What most “I shipped in a weekend” posts don’t tell you is how many weekends came before the one that counted.

The Product

Karen’s first idea was simple. Use Claude as a bridge to Canva. Feed it a 2,000-word article, let it generate carousel copy, then use the browser extension to paste it in.

Claude tried 126 times to close a Canva promotional pop-up. Same pop-up. Same failure. One hundred and twenty-six attempts.

Fine. I’ll just build the whole thing myself.

She validated the idea with Claude first. Claude’s answer was clear:

Don’t build it. The market’s cornered. Canva and Gamma have it covered. The addressable audience is spoken for.

Karen validated with humans next. People told her, without being prompted, that they’d pay for this.

She trusted the humans.

If you’ve ever built carousels from long-form content, you know the pain. You wrote the piece. The thinking is done. But the reformatting takes longer than the writing did. Open Canva, pick a template, manually copy text into each slide, one at a time. For a 10-slide carousel, that’s 30 to 40 context switches. Karen calls it death by a thousand clicks.

So she built CarouselBot. You feed it an article, it drafts the slides. You edit, adjust branding (including all Google fonts), generate or upload images, and export to PDF, PNG, or JPG.

Simple premise. Painful problem.

The core vision was clear from day one: transform content, not generate it. Karen isn’t building another AI content mill.

Attitude is building a tool that respects the work your users already did, instead of promising to replace it.

The Nos

Karen’s most interesting decisions are the things she refused to build, all on the advice of her AI.

#1

Claude said: This should be a Chrome extension! Everybody has an API key and knows what that is!

Karen said no. Her users are content creators, marketers, and publishers. They’re not developers. They don’t have API keys. They don’t want API keys. They want to paste an article and get pretty slides back.

#2

Claude said: You don’t need AI-generated images.

Karen said no. By then users were asking for it.

#3

Claude said: Let users fix the layout manually. You’re the only one who cares that much about widows and orphans!

For non-designers:

• a widow is a single word stranded on the last line of a paragraph

• an orphan is a single line stranded at the top or bottom of a page

They make otherwise clean layouts look broken.

She ignored Claude. And I love it. I would ignore it too.

I’ve spent years reviewing copy in decks, docs, and landing pages. You develop an eye for it. A single word dangling on the last line of a paragraph. A heading that splits awkwardly between two slides. You can’t unsee it once you start noticing.

The funny thing is, that nobody opens an app and thinks, wow, the text wrapping is excellent. But they notice when it’s bad. They just can’t name what’s wrong.

Karen can name it. From ten feet away.

When talked about refusing to ship without understanding why something makes sense, she was talking about logic and reasoning. Karen is applying the same discipline to pixels and line breaks.

Both are saying the same thing: shortcuts compound.

#4

Claude said: Let’s drop the database.

Claude’s go-to solution for any data-related problem is “let’s drop the database.” It has tried to nuke my production data on multiple occasions, so it’s no longer allowed to interact with my Vercel environment!

I laughed out loud at this. And then I thought about how many people wouldn’t catch that suggestion. How many production databases have been dropped because someone trusted an AI recommendation without reading it carefully.

Every time Claude pushed Karen toward a decision that was wrong for her users, she caught it. Because she knows something Claude doesn’t. She knows the humans on the other side of the screen.

Attitude is knowing when to trust the machine and when to trust yourself.

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The Stack

Karen started with ChatGPT. She describes it as gambling.

I’d describe what I wanted, it would generate code, I’d paste it into my project and see what happened, which was usually an error message I’d have to look up. It felt like gambling! It also motivated me to learn more about systems design and engineering best practices, so I could direct ChatGPT in ways that were less likely to produce bugs.

Then she moved to Anthropic’s Console. Longer context, fewer bugs, still the dreaded Python indentation errors.

Then Claude Code.

After a year of cut-and-paste coding through Anthropic’s Console, switching to Claude Code felt like a miracle.

The progression is instructive. Karen kept building through the discomfort. She also didn’t wait for the perfect tool. She used what existed and upgraded when something better arrived.

The Weight of It

I want to pause here. Because the facts of Karen’s situation deserve more than a passing mention.

A lot of CarouselBot gets built late at night when I should probably be sleeping.

She’s building CarouselBot while looking for full-time employment. In a market she calls grim. Taking whatever gig work she can find to keep things going. Raising two kids. Taking care of three large dogs.

And somehow, between all of that, finding hours to fight with payment processors.

You see, Paddle rejected her.

Her first choice for a merchant of record. The thing that would have let her accept payments from international users without registering individually in every country. Gone.

When you’re building alone, with no runway, and the payment infrastructure you need to monetize says no, it’s not a minor inconvenience.

But she kept going. Found Gumroad. Applied to Lemon Squeezy. Wired up an API integration. Solved it the way she’s solved everything else: one problem at a time, late at night.

The business side required almost as much time and energy as building the product itself, she says. The building part is much more fun.

This is another thing that is rarely mentioned in surface-level builder success stories: Pricing strategy. Payment infrastructure. International tax compliance. Competitive positioning. The boring, annoying work that “shipped in a weekend” culture treats as an afterthought, if it’s mentioned at all.

When it gets too frustrating, Karen walks Butter, her Labrador Retriever. Some quiet, zero-screen time. The dog gets exercise. Karen gets space to think without a screen telling her what’s broken.

Attitude is building through the doubt because the problem matters more than the fear.

That’s what five previous launches teach you. Not confidence that this one will work. Confidence that you’ll survive if it doesn’t.

Subscribe

What We’re Learning

There are many ways to build with AI.

You can let it drive, trust its market analysis and accept every suggestion. A lot of products get built that way.

Or you can build with attitude:

• keeping product judgment in your hands

• saying no when you know your users better than it does

• treating failed projects as data

• trusting your obsessions over what the AI calls “irrelevant”

Building tools with today’s technology is fun and easy, Karen says. Finding the right problem is harder.

Your AI doesn't know your users' last frustration. It knows the market's average. Before you accept its next recommendation, ask yourself:

Is this model building for my people, or for a statistical composite?

Multiple real products, shipped to real users taught her that.

CarouselBot Has Officially Launched

PwA readers can save $30 on an annual subscription with the code LAUNCH49. It’s good for the next 7 days.

Final Thoughts

I started this project thinking I should explain what building with attitude means.

Then I read the submissions.

Now I think it’s better if the meaning emerges from the builders themselves. We’ll define it together. One builder at a time.

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

• is working on a new tech art project and she needs your help! It’s one anonymous question. That’s it.

• built Wiz, a personal agent that, among many other tasks, helps him publish articles on a consistent schedule.

• built an AI Tutor for Claude, that won’t let you fake understanding.

• built an app for long-distance couples to help them stay connected.

• shipped Markdown-to-Branded PDF generator that turns any markdown file into a professionally branded PDF in seconds. Let him know if you’d like to try it! Dheeraj just joined StackShelf; you can see his profile and freebies here.

• built a guide about AI risk before deployment.

Are you tempted to start building but unsure where to start?
Start here.

👉 Vibecoding Resource Hub
👉 Vibecoding Guide From 2 Builders Who’ve Shipped
👉 UI Prompt Pack
👉 Rules-For-AI - Guiding Prompt

Built something already? I’ll help it get seen.

You don’t need to do everything alone. Let our community amplify your work.
As a PwA member, you can list your projects on StackShelf App: an online directory I built so your projects are discovered by readers, fellow builders, and AI. As of today, StackShelf has redirected 5,102 unique visitors to creators’ product sites.

Join us 🤗 It's fun!

The tool he built was ready. The market need was validated. The GTM playbook thought through. Clear-eyed unit economics. He'd done the work.

Then he shelved his product.

I don’t see it as a failure. I see it as a clean decision under constraints. Quitting can be strategic.

And I agree.

Welcome to the Build with Attitude Project

Why Authentic AI Development Stories Matter

I’m Karo 👋, AI product manager, builder of StackShelf.app, Attitudevault.dev and someone who believes that building value matters more than building what merely sells.

2025 feeds were flooded with “I vibe coded an app in two hours and already made $100K” posts:

These claims aren’t just unhelpful and misleading; they’re actively harmful by teaching extraction over value creation.

They reward performative certainty leaving no room for doubt, pivots, or the hardest call of all: walking away.

So I started collecting different stories. Not stories about tools, but about how people make judgment calls when certainty isn’t available.

Every second week, a builder walks you through how they actually think. Where they got stuck. What they changed. Why.

We’re all fans of vibe coding here. But we also believe in product thinking, craft, and building things that matter.

If you’re new to the series, welcome! Start here:
Build with Attitude - The Announcement
I Refuse To Ship Without Understanding Why It Makes Sense with
I Refuse To Amplify Hype That Ignores Who Pays The Price with

The Product

Queenstown, New Zealand is an adventure town.

The kind of place where everyone owns a kayak, a set of skis, climbing gear, maybe a mountain bike or two.

Most of it gets used twice a year.
The rest of the time it sits in garages, while a tourist down the street pays premium prices at a rental shop.

Casey noticed this. And he saw something else: that Queenstown is a tight community town, where people know each other and do the same activities.
And where renting gear is already normal, it’s just strangely formalized and expensive.

So he built GearShare.
A peer-to-peer rental marketplace for outdoor gear.
Rent from your neighbour instead of a shop. Booking, payments, messaging, trust and safety - the necessary parts, all included.

He wasn’t inventing something new. Just shifting who you rent from.

It was a serious attempt at solving a real problem: expensive outdoor gear sitting idle in garages while others nearby either buy duplicates, miss out, or pay premium rental shop prices.

The Builder

Casey’s origin story isn’t about gear rentals.
It starts earlier. And, unfortunately, darker.

I lost my ultra-running identity to chronic fatigue syndrome before I turned 30.
I spent years learning that who you are can’t depend on what you can do.

My heart breaks for him, honestly.
I can only imagine the toll. My stepfather is an ultra-runner and Ironman. If he couldn’t train, he’d be devastated. For people like that, movement isn’t a hobby. It’s structure. It’s meaning. It’s how the day makes sense.

When you’ve already had your identity stripped once by circumstances beyond your control, you develop a different relationship with ambition.
You stop confusing motion with progress.
You get very clear, very fast, about what actually matters.

I refuse to choose between ambition and presence, Casey says.

You see, while Casey was building Gearshare, life was doing what it does best: escalating.

I started this in 2023, when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter.
We made a very adult agreement: I could pursue it if I proved it was viable while keeping my day job. Only then, after a seed round, could I switch.

Then came August 6, 2025.
The day before our daughter’s first birthday.

We found out we were having twins.
Due March 10, 2026.

At that point, the decision didn’t feel dramatic, it felt mathematical. I can’t do this with these constraints.

By then, he’d been building for a little over two years. Long enough to understand what the work actually required:

• Marketplaces demand sustained, hands-on activation

• You can’t pause a cold-start and resume it when life calms down

• The network either exists or it doesn’t

So Casey chose presence.

And called it what it was: a life strategy, not surrender.
Sometimes the most ambitious decision is knowing when not to push.

The Stack

Stack choices are rarely about tools.
They’re about decisions: where to allow speed, where to demand rigor, and where to refuse to compromise.

In Casey’s case, the boundaries are explicit.

• Lovable for quick greenfield experiments

  • Priority: momentum over perfection

  • Casey optimizes early exploration for speed and low cognitive load. In greenfield work, the goal isn’t correctness or elegance, it’s learning.

  • He’s choosing a tool that lets him test ideas before they calcify, fully accepting that some experiments are meant to be thrown away.

• Claude Code for anything production-grade

  • Priority: judgment, safety, and long-term reliability.

  • This choice reveals a hard boundary: production work deserves constraints, clarity, and explainability.

• Cursor with Opus 4.5 for debugging and incisive changes

  • Priority: precision.

  • Debugging is where weak thinking gets exposed. By pairing Cursor with Opus 4.5, Casey is optimizing for targeted reasoning

• ShareTribe did the boring, necessary work: bookings, payments, messaging. Trust and safety. Which meant Casey didn’t have to.

  By letting the foundation handle the table stakes, he could spend his time on the parts that actually make or break a marketplace: referral loops and category-specific onboarding.

What this tells us about Casey as a builder:

• He moves fast where the cost of being wrong is low

• He slows down deliberately where trust is at stake

• He uses AI to sharpen thinking, not replace it

Biggest Learnings

How little of a marketplace is ‘the product’ and how much is forcing a network into existence.

This is the thing most vibe coding tutorials on Youtube skip entirely.
They show you the UI.
They walk through the tech stack.
They screenshot Stripe payments.

What they don’t tell you is that:
- a marketplace MVP is maybe 10% of the work.
- the other 90% is activation: convincing real humans to show up and list things.

As someone building Stackshelf.app (a Substack marketplace), I relate to this deeply.

Another hard lesson was this:

How easy it is to confuse building with preparing to build.

I set up production-grade analytics before anyone had even seen the staging URL.
Not because I was avoiding validation, but because I needed everything perfect before showing it.

I’ve seen this same pattern show up again and again across different builders.

• people implementing edge cases before the happy path works

• setting up team roles when the team is you

• adding approval workflows where no approvals are needed

• adding permissions, roles, and access control to a one-person app

These paths are often recommended by the AI. And it takes judgment to know when to ignore them.

Casey didn’t learn that judgment from tutorials.
He learned it the only way it tends to stick: by building.

Attitude here is knowing when advice is technically correct and deliberately ignoring it until it actually matters.

Where AI Helped (And Where It Lied)

Casey’s AI critique is one of the sharpest I’ve seen in this series:

Generating convincing ‘best practice’ lists that smuggled in hidden complexity, especially around trust and risk.

Boom.
This is the AI trap we should probably talk about more:
- the AI suggestions seem reasonable
- the output looks professional
- everything feels reassuring

But buried inside those neat bullet points is implementation complexity that only reveals itself after you’ve committed. After you’ve wired it. After you’ve announced it. After users now depend on it.

What he rejected from AI:
Anything that would create fake traction or explode scope when the only goal was proving real local liquidity.

I just love this!

How many vibe coded marketplaces have we all seen that exist for a day or two and proudly claim 300,000 users?

Casey chose transparency instead. And I respect that.

I made a similar choice with Stackshelf. I show exactly how many store referrals we’ve made. It’s not a flashy number. As of today, it’s only 5,039. But it’s real. And it’s growing.

When I asked Casey what would have been different without AI, he said:
Slower iteration on docs and strategy, but the core constraint (my time and presence) wouldn’t have changed.

AI accelerated the parts that didn’t matter. The constraint was never speed. It was founder presence.

Casey’s Advice

Don’t use speed as a substitute for truth. Ship the smallest thing that forces real user behaviour.

Three things worth underlining:

• Speed is not the goal: Shipping fast doesn’t mean you’ve proven anything. Speed without feedback just gets you to the wrong answer sooner.

• Real behavior is the test: Not signups. Actual humans doing the thing you built because it solves a problem for them.

• Truth over traction: You can manufacture metrics. You can’t manufacture product-market fit.

The uncomfortable part is that truth often grows slower (and looks worse) before it gets better.

What We’re Learning

There are many ways to build a marketplace.

You can push halfway. Keep it alive just enough. Chase activity without reaching liquidity. Burn evenings and weekends manufacturing momentum that resets the moment you stop.

A lot of marketplaces die that way; not in a dramatic failure, but in slow exhaustion.

Or you can build with attitude:

• acknowledging that marketplaces are activated, not launched

• understanding that cold starts don’t wait for life to calm down

• choosing sustainability over heroic narratives

• understanding that constraints clarify what matters

• respecting your own time and energy

Casey could have kept going. Kept the story warm. Kept proving just enough to justify another month.

Instead, he made a clean decision under real constraints, protecting his time, his presence, and his family.

Responsibility doesn’t shrink your ambition, Casey says. It sharpens it.

And I agree.

Final Thoughts

I started this project thinking I should explain what building with attitude means.

Then I read the submissions.

Now I think it’s better if the meaning emerges from the builders themselves. We’ll define it together. One builder at a time.

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Additional Resources

👉 Vibecoding Resource Hub

👉 Vibecoding Guide From 2 Builders Who’ve Shipped

👉 UI Prompt Pack

👉 Rules-For-AI - Guiding Prompt

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

• built WonderLead RePLAN: year-end review & strategic 2026 planning worksheet

• built a guide on how to integrate rigour and critical thinking when using feature prioritisation frameworks

• built a Free Illustrations Library: Human-made illustrations only!

• built StackContacts: the only CRM tool I use for managing my Substack subscribers.

• built a custom Deal Hunter

• is launching the alpha for Projekt, a prompt engineering tool built from the ground up for designers, design engineers and builders. Waitlist is open!

• built a Github repo with skills for product managers

• built HALO (High‑fidelity Alignment & Logic Overlay), a framework for building a stable AI companions.

  

Build It. I’ll Help It Get Seen.

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And none is more affected than leaders, expected to guide their teams through a transformation they don’t fully understand themselves.

Some feel pressure from above: Make this work.
Others feel anxiety from below: What’s going to happen to us?
And in the middle, the need to sound certain about something that isn’t.

has spent 40 years watching this pattern repeat. Not from the sidelines - from the cleanup crew.

She’s the one who steps in when grand plans unravel and meet their human consequences.

I’m not in the ‘move fast and break things’ camp, she says. I’ve cleaned up too many of those messes.

That experience taught her the hardest part is always the gap between the confidence leaders are asked to perform and the uncertainty they navigate alone.

Now she’s building tools to close that gap.

Welcome to the Build with Attitude Project

Why Authentic AI Development Stories Matter

I’m Karo 👋, AI product manager, builder of StackShelf.app, Attitudevault.dev and someone who believes that building value matters more than building what merely sells.

2025 feeds were flooded with “I vibe coded an app in two hours and already made $100K” posts:

These claims reward performative certainty over responsible judgment. They aren’t just unhelpful and misleading; they’re actively harmful by teaching extraction over value creation.

So I started collecting different stories. Not stories about tools, but about how people make judgment calls when certainty isn’t available.

Each week, a builder walks you through how they actually think. Where they got stuck. What they changed. Why.

We’re all fans of vibe coding here. But we also believe in product thinking, craft, and building things that matter.

If you’re new to the series, welcome! Start here:

JOIN US 🤗

The Builder

's Silicon Valley career started where the chips were literally made. Her first real paycheck came from National Semiconductor, where she worked while putting herself through college.

Decades of cleanup work gave Dee a particular kind of expertise in understanding what leaders need in times of uncertainty.

Now she's using that lens to help leaders navigate AI disruption, because she's seen this pattern before: high-stakes decisions made upstream, fallout absorbed downstream, and capable people in the middle expected to make it all work without the support they need.

When judgment is replaced by certainty theater, real people pay the price.

AI isn’t some distant disruption. It’s here, transforming industries, reshaping jobs, and redefining how we work. Yet, most professionals feel too busy, too overwhelmed, or too late to start. During the 2022 layoff wave, I realized it was time to make my expertise available to others.

Getting Started

Unlike many builders, Dee didn’t struggle with finding product-market fit. Her years of expertise made the need obvious.
She also didn’t doubt her ability to learn the tools. She doubted whether someone like her was allowed to use them.

There were times I worried I was playing at something I didn’t yet fully ‘deserve’ to do, she says.

Last week’s interview with revealed the same tension.
Builders aren’t asking, Can I figure this out?
They’re asking, Am I allowed to be here? Is what I built even real?

What kept me going was a mix of stubbornness and watching other Substack builders ship imperfect work in public, says Dee. If they could learn by doing, so could I.

This one sentence made me genuinely happy, because it names one of the goals behind the whole series: showing that permission travels not through courses or credentials, but through watching someone else go first.
Someone who looks enough like you that their attempt feels transferable.

AI fluency is becoming a baseline expectation. It’s already showing up in job descriptions and performance reviews.
If what we write convinces one person that they don't need a technical background to begin, that's success.

The Product

Dee went on to build a set of tools that help leaders navigate the transition.

The fact that Dee built her tools as guided self-assessments makes one thing obvious: she understands the pressures leaders are under right now.

Her tools don’t demand time you don’t have. There are no weeks-long courses, or conferences.

You aren’t being talked at (“this is what you should do”), but guided - through a set of proven questions they can use to self-assess.

This is what product craft looks like when you respect the reality leaders are already navigating. You pack value into the format they actually want, not the one trending on X.

Attitude, here, is knowing what not to ask from people you’re building for, and respecting that boundary in practice.

The Stack

Dee’s stack choices reveal her priorities.

• Frameworks & prompts belong in Notion ➜ over-engineering text helps no one

• Vibe coding tools for building the basics ➜ an obvious choice for non-developers

• Claude Skills as transferable value packs ➜ curation is the added value

• But when it came to payments, she stepped outside vibe coding entirely ➜ she used Stripe

Security and trust aren’t places to experiment, says Dee.

This is a choice every product builder eventually faces: where to explore, and where not to. The classic build-vs-buy decision, made with judgment.

Attitude is recognizing the trust boundary, and refusing to cross it.

The Trade-offs

When I asked what she deliberately left out, the answer was immediate:

I deliberately left out any features that increased complexity or data risk. To preserve simplicity and user autonomy.

And the trade-offs she knowingly accepted:

Speed over perfection.
Simplicity over broader feature sets.
Momentum over rigid planning.

This is what product thinking sounds like from someone who’s spent decades watching over-engineered solutions collapse under their own weight.

But it was Dee’s answer about where her own judgment mattered most that stuck with me:

Valuing clarity, ethics, and restraint over what is technically possible or tempting.

Attitude here is the discipline to say no when it would be easier to say yes.

For Builders Starting Out

Dee’s advice:

Just start. But not empty-handed. Plan lightly, expect detours, and lean hard on your domain knowledge. Context, judgment, and human collaboration matter more than perfection.

Especially when no one can tell you exactly what the right answer is.

Three things worth underlining:

• Not empty-handed. Your expertise is the raw material. The tools are just tools.

• Expect detours. The path won’t be linear. That’s not failure, that’s the process.

• Human collaboration matters more than perfection. You’re not building alone, even when it feels like it.

Without AI the only viable path would have been hiring a developer or significantly slowing down to learn traditional engineering first. That would have defeated the purpose, says Dee.

This is the real value proposition of vibe coding, stated plainly.
Not build faster. Not save money.
But: build at all.

The next time you hesitate, thinking you’re not “ready,” remember: These tools assume you’re not, and meet you there.

What We’re Learning

There are many ways to respond to AI disruption.

You could package certainty. Sell confidence. Promise mastery in six weeks. Turn anxiety into funnels.

Or you can build with attitude:

• shipping products in the format users actually want, not the one trending on X.

• respecting the time and cognitive load people actually have

• recognizing when infrastructure should be bought, not vibe coded, and refusing to experiment there

• recognizing which features introduce more data risk than value, and choosing not to build them

Dee could have chosen to sit in a studio and charge hundreds of dollars for online courses. Instead, she’s building tools that help as many people as possible, in their own time and on their own terms.

That’s not vibe coding for clout. That’s building what matters.
And that’s why I wanted to feature Dee in this series.

Final Thoughts

I started this project thinking I should explain what building with attitude means.

Then I read the submissions.

Now I think it’s better if the meaning emerges from the builders themselves. We’ll define it together. One builder at a time.

Additional Resources

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

• built a security audit slash command for Claude Code

• built a Notion-based Career Plan Template and Leadership Building Trust Bundle

• built Echo, a protocol that preserves your personal context

• built a Visual Distinctiveness Test GPT to improve Substack brand recognition

• built a n8n Self-Host Autopilot that helps you deploy your own n8n instance on cloud free tiers

• built a todo/calendar app that integrates with your Gmail

• built ChatGRP, one space where you, your team, and AI collaborate in real conversation.

Build It. I’ll Help It Get Seen.

You don’t need to do everything alone. Let our community amplify your work.
As a PwA member, you can list your projects on StackShelf App: an online directory I built so your projects are discovered by readers, fellow builders, and AI. As of today, StackShelf has redirected 5,039 unique visitors to creators’ product sites.

Join hundreds of Premium Members and unlock everything you need to build with AI. From prompt packs and code blocks to learning paths, discounts and the community that makes it so special.

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skipped the debate and went straight to experimentation.

She didn’t know it yet, but this single choice would define her 2025.

A year of building. Products. Community. A reputation — at work and in public — as someone who understands AI, not just discusses it.

I met Jenny at the beginning of that path, and despite being continents apart, we clicked instantly.

So when I started shaping the Build With Attitude series, Jenny was already part of the idea.

Welcome to the Build with Attitude Project

Why Authentic AI Development Stories Matter

I’m Karo 👋, AI product manager, builder of StackShelf.app, Attitudevault.dev and someone who believes that building value matters more than building what merely sells.

2025 feeds were flooded with “I vibe coded an app in two hours and already made $100K” posts:

These claims aren’t just unhelpful and misleading; they’re actively harmful by teaching extraction over value creation.

So I started collecting different stories.

Each week, a builder walks you through how they actually think. Where they got stuck. What they changed. Why.

We’re all fans of vibe coding here. But we also believe in product thinking, craft, and building things that matter.

If you’re new to the series, welcome! Start here:
Build with Attitude - The Announcement

SUBSCRIBE 🤗

The Builder

How She Balances Speed and Understanding

Jenny’s time to build begins when everyone else’s day ends.

I’m not sure if that’s discipline or stubbornness, she admits. Probably both. But there’s something about the quiet of the house that makes the code flow easier.

Those limited hours made her ruthless about what counts. No room for speculative features or exploratory detours.

I stopped chasing ‘someday perfect’ and started shipping ‘good enough tonight’.

This isn’t the abandonment of craft; it’s the refusal to let imagined future standards block present learning. Choosing discovery over polish, feedback over fantasy. The kind of trade-off every product builder eventually has to make.

For Jenny, understanding what she builds matters more than going fast just to go fast.

I want to ship fast, but I refuse to ship what I don’t understand.

That tension between shipping and knowing, moving fast and understanding why, shapes everything she builds.

That choice isn’t accidental. It’s attitude: knowing what to push forward, and what to refuse.

The Problem With Vibe Coding: Visibility vs. Validation

The Assumptions She Started With

Every builder starts with assumptions. Jenny was clear about hers.

Domain expertise matters more than technical credentials. Builders who ship successful products are the ones who know their problem deeply, not the ones who know the most code.

I recognize this as something that often shows up in product work:
- Understanding code helps you move faster
- Understanding the problem tells you whether you should be going there at all

Jenny’s belief in expertise shaped her first idea.

The Problem She Thought She Was Solving

I was getting messages from domain experts who were excited about building their own tools but felt intimidated by traditional coding spaces.

They had deep expertise in their fields and genuine problems to solve, but nowhere to showcase their AI-assisted solutions without judgment.

Jenny came up with an idea for vibecoding.builders - a place where builders using AI could share what they’d built and learn from each other’s journeys.

At first, the need looked obvious.
Builders want visibility.
They want an audience.
They want their work to be seen.

The Problem She Actually Ended Up Solving

But Jenny didn’t stop there. She pressure-tested her assumptions by talking to future users.

What looked like a visibility problem turned out to be something much deeper.

I expected builders to want visibility, she says. I learned that many of them needed validation.

People were building real things: apps, tools, working prototypes. But without recognition from traditional developer spaces, they weren’t sure their work counted.

Existing developer communities like Hacker News and Reddit were often hostile to anything labeled “vibe coding.” Even developers who actively use AI assistance refused to associate with the term. They saw it as diminishing their “serious coder” identity.

The irony is that everyone is doing some form of vibe coding now.

This is the hidden cost of the “vibe coder” stigma. The judgment doesn’t come from users. It comes from other builders.

And it doesn’t just keep people out of communities. It keeps them from trusting their own work.

Without support from fellow builders, many started questioning whether what they’d built was legitimate at all.

Jenny built vibecoding.builders precisely because of this disconnect.

We needed a space that celebrated building with AI — not apologizing for it. A place where the value of a solution matters more than the pedigree of the code behind it.

Building an AI Development Community With Product Thinking

There’s one part of Jenny’s work that could easily become hollow if it were done by someone with a different attitude.

I thought featuring builders would be simple, she says. Share what they built. Celebrate their wins.

But every story carries weight. People trusted her with their journey: their doubts, their first project, their uncertainty about whether it even counted.

Getting that right, doing their experience justice, felt heavier than any technical problem she’d solved.

This resonates with me deeply. It’s what happens when you take community seriously. It stops being a growth strategy and becomes a responsibility.

The builders we feature aren’t content. They’re people who took a risk by sharing something unfinished, uncertain, real.

That weight is invisible from the outside. But it shapes everything about how good community platforms work — what gets featured, how stories are framed, what gets amplified, and what doesn’t.

Here, attitude is the refusal to treat other people’s stories as content — and the willingness to carry their weight with care.

When AI Suggestions Aren’t the Right Answer

Another thing that strikes me about Jenny’s approach is how deliberately she’s avoided the traps.

• When AI suggested adding gamification features (leaderboards, achievement badges), she declined. Every platform adds these, but I didn’t want people comparing themselves to others. The goal is showcasing what’s possible, not ranking who’s ‘best.’

• When AI suggested rebranding away from “vibe coding” to attract more serious users, she refused. The whole point is creating a space that doesn’t apologize for AI-assisted building.

These are small decisions. But they reveal a larger philosophy: that building with AI is not the same as outsourcing your judgment to AI.

Attitude here is recognizing that what increases platform activity can also destroy safety — and choosing not to optimize for it.

When Tools Change Faster Than Identity

Jenny was clear about what she hopes readers take away from her work.

Permission. Permission to fail publicly and learn from it. Permission to believe that their ‘non-technical’ background is actually an asset.

And then:

I want people to stop hiding the fact that they used AI and start celebrating what they actually built.

We’re in a strange moment where the tools have sprinted ahead but our identity narratives are still tying their shoes. People are building things they couldn’t have built two years ago. And instead of celebrating that, or showing how to do it better, we’re arguing about labels.

Jenny’s answer is simple: focus on what you made. Focus on whether it works. Focus on the people it helps.

The rest is noise.

What We’re Learning

There are many ways to build a platform for vibe coders.

You could build one in an afternoon. Throw in badges. Add a leaderboard. Optimize for activity, revenue, and whatever metric looks good in a YouTube thumbnail. Charge aggressively. Ask questions later. Or never.

Or you can build with attitude:

• understanding whether it creates the right kind of value

• understanding the non-obvious problems it actually solves

• protecting people over metrics

• learning first, and always

• keeping your judgment where AI would happily take over

Jenny chose the second path. And that’s why I wanted to feature her in this series.

Final Thoughts

I started this project thinking I should explain what building with attitude means.

Then I read the submissions.

Now I think it’s better if the meaning emerges from the builders themselves. We’ll define it together. One builder at a time.

Additional Resources

👉 Vibecoding Resource Hub

👉 Vibecoding Guide From 2 Builders Who’ve Shipped

👉 UI Prompt Pack

👉 Rules-For-AI - Guiding Prompt

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

• Substack CRM by

• LinkedIn Carousel Builder by

• Asaura AI by

• AI Prompt Manager by

• Note Stack by

• Sparkub by

Build It. I’ll Help It Get Seen.

You don’t need to do everything alone. Let our community amplify your work.
As a PwA member, you can list your projects on StackShelf App: an online directory I built so your projects are discovered by readers, fellow builders, and AI. As of today, StackShelf has redirected 5,039 unique visitors to creators’ product sites.

Join hundreds of Premium Members and unlock everything you need to build with AI. From prompt packs and code blocks to learning paths, discounts and the community that makes it so special.

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Last updated: February 2026, 6 entries.

About This Series

What is Build with Attitude?

• A bi-weekly interview series featuring real AI builders making real product decisions. Not thought-leader takes, not frameworks, not tutorials.

  Each entry captures one judgment call from one builder, with full context on why they made it.

• The series launched in January 2026 with one premise: the feeds are full of I vibe coded an app in two hours and made $100K posts. These stories are different. They’re about product thinking, craft, and the judgment calls that separate builders from shippers.

  36 interviews are planned. New entries are added to this page as they publish.

  → Read the series announcement

• Who are these builders? Founders, product managers, vibe coders, and creators shipping AI products in 2026.

  • Some overrule their AI.

  • Some shelve products.

  • Some refuse to ship.

  • All of them think before they build.

• Why does this matter now? AI makes building fast. That means the bottleneck moved. It’s no longer “can you build it?”. It’s “should you?”

  These interviews answer that question with real stories, not hot takes.

Questions We Explored

When should you refuse to ship an AI product you don’t understand?

built uilt Vibecoding Builders as a space where AI-assisted builders could share their work without the judgment of traditional developer communities. She ships fast, but refuses to ship what she doesn't understand. When AI suggested adding gamification features like leaderboards and achievement badges, she declined, choosing to protect the community over optimizing for engagement metrics. A builder decision that proves vibe coding without product thinking is just noise.

→ Read the full story: I Refuse To Ship Without Understanding Why It Makes Sense

How can AI tools help corporate leaders navigate transformation they don’t fully understand?

spent 40 years watching grand tech plans unravel and cleaning up their human consequences. She built Leading Through the Shift — a set of guided self-assessments that help leaders navigate AI disruption on their own terms. Her key design decision: tools that respect the cognitive load leaders are already carrying, delivered in the format they want, not the one trending on X. A judgment call about who the product serves, not what the algorithm rewards.

→ Read the full story: I Refuse To Amplify Hype That Ignores Who Pays The Price

What happens when you shelve an AI product after building it for two years?

built GearShare, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace for outdoor gear in Queenstown, New Zealand. The product was ready. The market validated. The GTM playbook done. Then he found out he was having twins. He shelved the product — calling it a life strategy, not surrender. His lesson: marketplaces are activated, not launched, and cold starts don't wait for life to calm down. Sometimes the hardest product decision is knowing when not to ship.

→ Read the full story: I Refuse To Choose Between Ambition And Presence

How should vibe coders evaluate AI recommendations they disagree with?

overruled Claude's advice on four major product decisions while building CarouselBot — including Claude's recommendation not to build it at all. Her five previous product launches, from Good Bloggy to FutureScan to a series of Chrome extensions, gave her the judgment to know when to trust human validation over AI market analysis. Most "I shipped in a weekend" posts don't tell you how many weekends came before the one that counted.

→ Read the full story: I Refuse To Let The AI Decide What My Users Need

What does “vibe prototyping” look like when a music producer uses it?

pays $10/month for Suno AI and deletes every track it generates. He doesn't use AI to make music. He uses it to communicate musical ideas he can't explain with words — creating vocal references that save $200–300 per track in wasted studio time. His workflow proves that AI's best use isn't generating final output. It's bridging the gap between what's in your head and what others need to hear. The sharpest AI product thinking happens when you know exactly what to throw away.

→ Read the full story: He Pays $10/Month for AI Music. Deletes Every Track.

How do you product-think when AI builds at lightning speed?

Speed is the easy part. Knowing what to build, and when not to, is the hard part. This is the founding thesis behind Build with Attitude: that the builders who matter in 2026 aren’t the ones shipping fastest, but the ones making better judgment calls about what deserves to exist. Vibe coding gives you velocity. Product thinking gives you direction. One without the other is expensive noise.

→ Read the full story: How To Product-think When AI Builds At Lightning Speed

Questions We’re Exploring Next

hese are the questions coming up in future Build with Attitude interviews. Each will get its own answer capsule and builder story as the series grows.

• How do you price an AI product when the underlying costs keep changing?

• What’s the difference between vibe coding and real product development?

• How do you find your first 100 users for an AI product?

• How do you build an AI product while working a full-time job?

• Should you use AI to build your AI product?

• When should you pivot an AI product versus kill it?

• How do you test an AI product before launch?

• What happens when your AI product gets its first angry user?

• What do AI builders wish they knew before they started?

Know a builder with a strong answer to one of these? Nominate them for the series.