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April 2025 — From Prompts to Products

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MISSION+
April 03, 2025

The new OpenAI image generation model took the internet by storm last week, with everyone creating “Ghiblified” versions of their photographs.

Cute, but only a mere fraction of the potential of a model that has hugely improved prompt adherence and the ability to put large amounts of text into generated images. 

Prompt: “Draw an infographic of the ingredients of a pizza, and the final product.”

OpenAI is using a different approach to image generation under the hood, and I think this ushers in a whole new chapter in the genAI story. Exciting times!

Reflections On The Mission

The age of the vibe coder has arrived. Enter a state of flow, become one with the AI, and guide it to outcomes. But what actually works, and what is hype?

A core feature of vibe coding is iteration. The viber codes by conversing with the AI, going back and forth until the result feels right. The more state that is altered in between those iterations, the more needs to be migrated each time. At the most extreme is data model persistence - needing to literally do a data migration. That level of overhead quickly becomes unsustainable.

It is telling that software delivered by vibe coding has gravitated towards games and personal productivity applications. Both contain minimal persistent state.

State Spectrum

Here’s a rough hierarchy of components, ordered by how much persistent state they typically manage:

  1. UI: minimal or ephemeral state

  2. Service/API orchestration

  3. External service integration

  4. Multiple instance synchronization (transient state)

  5. Authentication & authorisation

  6. CRUD/ORM with business logic

  7. Data persistence layer: most tightly coupled to state

A potential approach to minimise state migration is the use of an intermediary Product Requirement Document (PRD). The viber iterates on the PRD until happy, and then converts the PRD to code. The PRD does not contain state, and so there is no risk of corruption or breaking something.

I see vibe coding - indeed, just coding - in the future to look something a bit like this:

  • The viber describes their idea to an AI scoping agent.

  • The agent produces a PRD and some sample mockup screens.

  • The viber iterates on the PRD and mockups, refining them until they reflect the original intent.

  • The agent has access to a catalog of vibe templates that cover common use cases that have been structured for AI use. The agent matches the PRD to one or more of these templates, and creates v1 of the actual product.

  • The viber iterates upon the product. Each template defines non-negotiable constraints to guide the agent’s generation.

  • Product hosting is built into the vibe coding tool (Vibe AIDE?), so the viber can easily deploy test and production environments.

The result? More vibing, less migrating.

Interesting Articles

  • https://gandalf.lakera.ai/ - can you get Gandalf to reveal the secret password? Super fun introduction to jail-breaking AI prompts, and a great example of how dangerous in-house chatbots can be without proper guardrails.

  • Built for Mars Cheatsheet - The Built for Mars team produces some of the most actionable, high quality advice out there (you might remember the ‘how many clicks to onboard to a neobank’ post that did the rounds, that was them as well). This cheatsheet is full of goodies.

  • The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past - it’s scary how much Rishad Tobaccowala’s blog aligns with the MISSION+ way of thinking. Definitely worth subscribing to read more about the future of work, AI, strategic marketing and more.

  • Tracing the thoughts of a large language model by Anthropic - From the article: “We were often surprised by what we saw in the model: In the poetry case study, we had set out to show that the model didn’t plan ahead, and found instead that it did.” Err, what? Autoregressive language models aren’t supposed to be able to do that…

This Is The Way

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

Until next month,

Ned & the MISSION+ team

P.S. If you would like to bring the MISSION+ team into your organisation to help, please reach out to [email protected]!

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