I Refuse To Amplify Hype That Ignores Who Pays The Price

Build with Attitude #2: How to product-think when AI builds at lightning speed

I’ve yet to meet a corporate employee who’s not affected by AI.

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.

Dee McCrorey 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:

The Builder

Dee McCrorey'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 Jenny Ouyang 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.

Leading Through the Shift™

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.

Read my full interview with Jenny Ouyang

Additional Resources

What’s Being Built in the PwA Community Right Now

• Lakshmi Narasimhan built a security audit slash command for Claude Code

• Patricia Juarez @ AWS built a Notion-based Career Plan Template and Leadership Building Trust Bundle

• Jeremy Wright - Marketer built Echo, a protocol that preserves your personal context

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

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

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

• Christopher Fichtner 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.

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