Earn Your Vibe

"Am I token maxxing enough?"

The collective euphoria (mostly manufactured in the bay) around pushing your model usage limits has reached an intensity that it is probably giving builders and founders around the world a bit of fomo.

Building a product has always been about moving fast, but an important but often overlooked aspect of creating something new is also to have your own imprint on it, where one can step back and say "This is mine!"

And the degree of a point of view may vary based on your role, interests and focus. If you're a product designer you might not have a strong point of view around whether the tech stack should be NodeJS or Go microservices, but if you ARE undertaking the challenge of building it all by yourself, take the time to at least read about the fundamentals and trade offs, cuz those technical decisions will ultimately affect UX and your customers, and not caring about that means not caring about the customer.

The same goes for Engineers who need to understand and absorb some of the core tenets of design.

But having a strong point of view is vital. And that's only possible if you if you take the time to learn enough about the domain. It does not mean that every line of code needs to have your imprint (and rest assured that with coding agents that won't be the case, anyway.)

The more enlightened you are, the more precise your judgment becomes and your 'vibe' becomes less random. I call this mode Method Vibing! Which means you have absorbed enough of the domain that you know exactly what feels off. You know when the product "works" technically but misses the central truth of the problem.

TLDR; token maxxing without a strong point of your own, might give you a product, but it won't be your own.