We used to spend weeks getting ready to build.
Whiteboarding sessions. Planning meetings. Design reviews. Product briefs. Engineering scoping. Five people, ten hours, trying to imagine a thing that didn't exist yet.
Then we'd build a smaller version of what we imagined. Then we'd ship it. Then we'd learn it was wrong.
The whole loop took months. Most of that time was spent in rooms, arguing about hypotheticals.
Vibe coding changes the shape of this entirely.
Cut to the chase
The new move is simple. Understand the jobs to be done. Then vibe code a real solution, end to end, right now.
Not a mock. Not a Figma. Not a PRD with bullet points about what it could be. A working thing. Something you can click through, break, and feel.
Pair engineers with designers and PMs. Refine it together in real time. When the flow feels off, change it. When the copy is wrong, rewrite it. When a step should be collapsed, collapse it.
Rick Rubin it. Keep going until it feels right.
It's real. It's also a hackathon project.
Here's the part people get stuck on.
The thing you just built is real in every way that matters for understanding the problem. It's also a hackathon project. It's not production. It's not hardened. It doesn't have the auth model, the telemetry, the edge cases, the accessibility work, the failure modes mapped out.
That's fine. That's the point.
Because now you have the thing every SDLC traditionally spends months trying to produce: clarity. You know exactly what you're building. You've already made all the decisions that would have been arguments in a meeting. You know which parts are hard and which are easy, because you actually tried to build them.
Then you productionize for real
Use AI to decompose the hackathon project into its real production components. What are the workstreams? What's the data model? What's the API surface? What's the auth story? What are the tests?
Respec the work with OpenSpec. Turn the vibe-coded thing into a set of real specifications your engineers and their agents can execute against.
You have a huge head start. The technical approach is proven. The UX is decided. The hard calls are made. What's left is execution.
Then deploy background agents to build it for real. Let them work the workstreams in parallel while you focus on the human parts: the nuanced product calls, the customer conversations, the polish that still needs an eye.
The advantage is enormous
Nothing is theoretical. You're not guessing at what the product should feel like, because you already built a version of it. You're not going to discover a fatal flaw three weeks in, because you already ran into it in the hackathon.
You got to the end of the idea fast. You discovered everything you needed to know on the way.
This is months faster. Not in theory. In practice.
The SDLC for mature companies isn't going to look like waterfall. It isn't going to look like two-week sprints full of story pointing either.
It's going to look like: build the thing, feel the thing, respec the thing, deploy the agents.
Hackathon-driven development. That's the process now.