#444 – When the CEO Vibe Codes

This week we shipped an integration for Linear, our most requested integration.

Early in Parabol’s life, I often wrote code:

As the product matured and my responsibilities grew, my direct contributions to the product also dwindled. Vision and strategy are my primary accountabilities, however, and sometimes those accountabilities have best been expressed by creating prototypes I’ve coded directly.

Here are a few contributions I’ve personally coded instead of mocking them up:

METR has recently shared data showing AI’s capabilities are doubling roughly every 7 months. AI is likely the most important technological shift of our lifetime. I predict it will be more impactful than the consumerization of computing, the internet, and even the smartphone. I see staying on top of emerging AI capabilities to be of paramount strategic importance.

In the past several months “vibe coding” has become increasingly popular. The basic concept is to not write a line of code directly but rather to instruct AI on what changes to apply. I wondered, could a new integration be added to Parabol merely by vibe? One weekend I set out to find out.

It turns out, no, you can’t just vibe code an integration.

I created a three-step plan to vibe-code a Linear integration:

This plan did not work. Steps 1-2 went fine, more than fine in fact. I could have used the output to inform a development team what to do (in the end, I was that development team). Step 3 was garbage. Hot garbage. The code produced was sloppy and incomplete. I found I needed to spend more time writing a creative prompt in order to fix the functionality of the code than just to produce the code directly. Further, when the code was functional I’d still need to take a time-intensive pass to clean it up.

I should have given up then and shared my results, but I was having too much fun.

In the end, it took about 40 working hours (most of it evening time on the weekends) to prepare the Linear integration for production. Using AI was invaluable to the process. Considering that it took over 2 person-months to bring our GitLab integration to production, it can be estimated that applying AI to this problem has yielded a roughly 8X productivity increase.

In the end the development proceeded as:

Here is an internal video of my initial feature-complete demo:

All-in-all a productivity speed up of 8X is wild. In the next 7 months it feels feasible that vibe coding a complex feature like an integration may entirely be possible. Building at the speed of thought feels inevitable. And then what? It’s going to be wild…and unpredictable. We’ll make sure to keep relating our experience here.

In the meantime, if you want to try our new Linear integration, you may learn more about it at these places:

We saw a healthy spike in Monthly Web Sessions this week, up almost 5% from the previous week. The uptick in New Signups was nice to see ahead of the anticipated slowdown we typically get with the US holiday, Memorial Day, next week.

…were notified that Parabol is now awardable on Platform One’s Marketplace.

…added Team Health chart to the company usage report.

…added the ability for Org Admins to rename a team in the Org Team view.

…head into the final 2 weeks of Cycle 8.

…finish testing v1 of our new music player inside the app.