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Hi everyone, here is Ricardo Vargas and welcome to the 5 Minutes podcast. In this episode, I want to go back on what I've been talking about for the past 2 or 3 weeks. It's about vibe coding. And of course, I'm not a software developer, but I see an absolutely dramatic potential that vibe coding will do, disrupting some of our thinking about what Project Management for software development is about. First, what is vibe coding? Very simple. It's you use generative AI to, not help you to do the code, but basically to do the code for you. It means you just talk in natural language. You can talk, you can write, and it will interpret this into a software language, and it will develop and do pretty much everything for you. And I know many of you will say, but Ricardo, since the time ChatGPT was released, Chatgpt did that. Gemini does that. Claude does that. It's not this what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about another level. What we saw in these two years, it's, I would say, a massive advancement in this that is putting a big question mark on what project management for software and the software industry is about. Let me explain this. What is, what I tell everyone about project management? That if you spend one minute here on planning means if you do proper planning and established planning, you will save maybe 100 minutes here on the execution because you will make fewer mistakes. Things will be faster because instead of you building, destroying, and rebuilding, you already plan and you make fewer mistakes during execution. This is the essence of what project management is about. So what was our assumption that the cost of the execution to fix things is very high? It's very painful and it's very complex. And this is the difference now. So what is happening with vibe coding? It's people who said, why do I need to produce all the artifacts to do software development, why do I just build the idea of what I need and I go and start talking to AI. Start, you know, just making the prompts, fixing, and let's I to figure out the problem for me. This is what is happening today because of the cost, imagine for you the cost of you finding a mistake in your code for you to redo your code. This used to be very painful, so you had to have a very clear definition here to avoid that. But right now, you know, you just, I did that two weeks ago in Austin at the South by Southwest. During the break, my friend Manuel and I, we were together developing an app using vibe coding. And, you know, one of the okay buttons was not in the place we wanted, we said, please shift this button to the left or to the right. You know it takes a second to fix immediately. Even when you receive an error message, you just copy that error, put and say solve it for me and it will go there and investigate the code for you. So what happened is happening. The execution is becoming much, much less painful up to the point that people are starting to question, why do I need to plan on that? And this is an absolutely big disruption. Okay. I know that some of you listening to me are saying, wow, this is this is big. Or maybe, you know, it's very common when we are talking about change and I spoke a lot about change that people start saying, you know, Ricardo, this will never replace programmers. And this, I understand that, but I would be a little bit skeptical about saying that it will never be replaced because of what we saw in two years, I would say these tools are not perfect. Of course, if you are a very good programmer, it will not replace you. But the pace things are happening, it's shifting. So probably you will intervene in these AI Tools when it's needed or when something very complex is needed, that it is very hard to give the right instructions. But most of the, you know, the vanilla code, you know, the basic code will be developed. And this is a dramatic shift because these may make Agile redundant. So why do I need to do all of that if I can just talk, if I can just talk to AI and and do that for me. So why I'm saying this? Because it's the first time I see AI going towards disrupting the very core of what is project management and what is project management in software. Of course, this will be much harder to happen in construction because you cannot say, okay, I didn't like that door, let's just demolish the door and make the door in another place. But when you're talking about intangible products, I would say software, for example, you can do that in a much easier way. So this will be a massive shift in the mindset of what is to be a project manager in the software industry. So what is my advice to all of you? It's first you need to understand what is going on. So if I were you, I would look for tools like the one I'm using most. It's called Lovable. Lovable. I will take a look at Ccursor, I will take a look at interface V0 by Vercel and I will take a look, of course, many of you, if you are working on this field, are already using GitHub Copilot. And these are. I know that it's very easy to be defensive and say this will never reach its full potential, and maybe it will never. But remember that the first steps of the ladder of these two managed projects in software development, they will be done by AI. That's a no-brainer at all. And it's an easy and fast adoption. Probably in one year from now we will be talking completely differently about how we develop software so people will develop. Of course, there are plenty of risks and I would love to hear your comments on that, but it's the first time I see this happening in my field in such a dramatic speed at South by Southwest. Every single person we're talking about using AI for software development. So probably AI and software development will become in the next 3 to 6 months, something like the ChatGPT, the Cloud, Perplexity, and Gemini are doing for language, translation, and creative writing. So think always about that, because we are facing this disruption and this disruption will not end. And the best way for us to prepare is to know what is coming. So take a look at these tools. Most of them are free, so free to use I would say on smaller scales do that because it will prepare you yourself, you will prepare yourself for, I would say, a very disruptive future we may see in the future. Look, I hope you enjoyed this podcast, and see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
