​Getting paid to vibe code: Inside the new AI-era job | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder)

Lazar Jovanovic is a full-time professional vibe coder at Lovable. His job is to build both internal tools and customer-facing products purely using AI, while not having a coding background. In this conversation, he breaks down the tactics, workflows, and framework that let him ship production-quality products using only AI.

We discuss:

1. Why having no coding background can be an advantage when building with AI

2. Why most of your time should go to planning and chat mode, not prompting

3. What to do when you get stuck: his 4×4 debugging workflow

4. The PRD and Markdown file system that keeps AI agents aligned across complex builds

5. Why kicking off four or five parallel prototypes is the best way to clarify your thinking

6. Why design skills and taste are going to be the most important skills in the future

7. His “genie and three wishes” mental model for making the most of AI’s limitations

8. How product, engineering, and design roles are converging—and what that means for your career

Brought to you by:

Strella—The AI-powered customer research platform

Samsara—Saving lives with AI built for physical operations

WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs

Where to find Lazar Jovanovic:

• X: https://x.com/lakikentaki

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazar-jovanovic

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@50in50challenge

• Starter Story course: https://build.starterstory.com/build/ai-build-accelerator?via=lazar (code LAZAR15 for 15% off)

Referenced:

• The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playbook-for-2026-elena-verna

• Elena Verna on how B2B growth is changing, product-led growth, product-led sales, why you should go freemium not trial, what features to make free, and much more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/elena-verna-on-why-every-company

• The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led

• 10 growth tactics that never work | Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/10-growth-tactics-that-never-work-elena-verna

• Lovable: https://lovable.dev

• Lovable + Shopify: https://lovable.dev/shopify

• Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch

• Mobbin: https://mobbin.com

• Dribbble: https://dribbble.com

• 21st.dev: https://21st.dev

• Lovable base prompt generator: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67e1da2c9c988191b52b61084438e8ee-lovable-base-prompt

• Lovable PRD generator: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67e1e85fbeac8191a69b95c6d5c42ef6-lovable-prd-generator

• Felix Haas’s newsletter: https://designplusai.com

• Bauhaus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus

• Glassmorphism: https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1197106608665398190/glassmorphism

• UI style guide: http://uistyle.lovable.app

• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com

• Ben Tossell on X: https://x.com/bentossell

• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell

• Peter Thiel says AI will be ‘worse’ for math nerds than for writers: https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-ai-worse-for-math-professionals-than-writers-2024-4

• Andrej Karpathy on X: https://x.com/karpathy

• The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google’s secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/surge-ai-edwin-chen

• Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/experts-writing-ai-evals-brendan-foody

• Slumdog Millionaire: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

Read more