The Weekly Vibe - Jan 9, 2026 - Tooling overload, write a PRD, and ship (without burning tokens)

What a call today. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of “best” tools in vibe coding right now… you’re not alone. One of the biggest themes in this session was tool fatigue: there are so many options (Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Claude Code, AI Studio, etc.) that it’s hard to settle on a workflow long enough to actually ship.

A few highlights from the conversation:

1) The new bottleneck isn’t coding — it’s merging work

We talked about orchestration tools (Maestro/Beads/Conductor, Gastown, Graphite) and why “merge” is the next wall: multiple agents, multiple worktrees, multiple changes… but how do you reliably bring it back together without chaos?

2) Don’t build first. PRD first.

Gary shared a super common experience: jumping straight into a builder (Bolt/Lovable) and getting something that looks “functional,” but then getting stuck trying to update it, improve it, or keep it current—while burning through tokens doing basic changes.

The big unlock: start with a PRD. When you do the thinking up front, you massively reduce the “rebuild, redo, retokenize” loop later.

3) BMAD as an on-ramp (and multiplier)

We demo’d a quick BMAD setup and talked through how it acts like an agile team in a box: analyst, architect, PM, dev, test, UX, etc. The point isn’t to worship any framework—the point is to force clarity before you start generating code.

Once you have a PRD, you can drop it into:

Google AI Studio (fast + strong frontend)
Lovable/Replit (great for MVPs)…and you’ll get way closer to what you actually meant.

4) The “cheap loop” trick: big changes in builders, small changes locally

A practical workflow that came up:

Generate the base app in Lovable (or AI Studio)
Push to GitHub
Pull locally and do the small tweaks with VS Code + Claude Code/Roo Code (pay-as-you-go)
Push back when you need a big feature → sync back into the builder

This keeps you from hitting daily limits and wasting credits on tiny edits.

5) Security can’t be “later”

We closed with a real talk security segment (OWASP Top 10, continuous testing, supply chain risk). The moment you ship, you’re in the arena—so bake it into the process early.

Watch the video, then drop a comment: what’s the one tool/workflow you’re committing to for the next 2 weeks so you can ship something real?

1:00:00

2 comments