How to Use AI to Restructure Your Work (And Actually Try Vibe Coding Today)

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My goal is to make this as valuable and practical as possible as we navigate the new AI era. 🚀

Here are a few things I found recently:

If you’re Gen X, chances are you’ve been working for a while. Funny thing is, companies are generally chaos held together by a few high performers keeping the rest afloat. There always is a bunch of very poor tools and even poorer processes.

After a while, your work cadence/style can get messed up, can get unstructured & reactionary. AI can help with that!

Most people's AI workflow looks like this:

That's not AI-assisted work. That's work with occasional AI interruptions.

The mental model is backwards. You're still doing the heavy lifting. AI is just a fancy search engine that sometimes writes code that almost works.

Here's what actually works:

Step 1: Describe the outcome, not the task

Instead of "write a function that validates email addresses," try "I need to validate user input before it hits the database—email, phone, and address fields. The validation needs to be consistent across our React frontend and Node backend."

See the difference? You're describing what you're trying to achieve, not the mechanical steps. AI can figure out the steps. That's literally what it's good at.

Step 2: Let AI do the first draft of everything

Everything. The code. The documentation. The test cases. The project structure.

Your job isn't to write code anymore. Your job is to evaluate code, improve code, and make decisions about code.

Step 3: Work in tight feedback loops

The old workflow: plan for three days, build for two weeks, discover it's wrong.

The AI workflow: describe → generate → test → adjust. Takes about 20 minutes. If it's wrong, you've lost 20 minutes, not two weeks.

Step 4: Batch the human-judgment stuff

AI can generate a hundred variations. You need to pick the right one. That's where your experience matters.

I batch my decision-making. I'll have AI generate five approaches to a problem, then spend 15 minutes evaluating all of them.

Stop thinking: "What tasks can AI help me with?"

Start thinking: "What decisions require my judgment, and what can AI handle?"

For most knowledge work, AI can handle about 80% of the generation. Your job is the 20% that requires taste, experience, and domain knowledge.

"Vibe coding" means you describe what you want in natural language, and AI writes the code. You guide the vibe. The AI does the typing. Just search on YouTube for how may amazing things people are building. See here for what I’ve been building as a relative newbie.

I’ll be writing some more in depth articles on this in future, but here’s the starting point.

Go to replit.com, sign up (free), and click "Create Repl." Pick any template—Python, JavaScript, whatever. Now click the AI button and type: "Build me a simple todo list app with add, delete, and mark complete."

Watch it build the whole thing. In your browser. No installs. No terminal. No config files.

That's vibe coding. You described what you wanted, AI wrote the code, and you've got a working app in about three minutes.

Want to change something? Just tell it: "Add a dark mode toggle" or "Make it save to local storage." The AI reads your existing code and updates it.

Replit's free tier is plenty to mess around with. Once you're hooked, you can explore other tools.

Weekly AI strategies for operating executives
— Brett

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