"No Code" doesn't mean "No Plan"

I’m pretty up on the latest and greatest in AI, so when we were planning our daughter’s wedding reception last summer, I thought I should be able to just upload a photo of our backyard and say “We want to host a wedding here. Tell us how to make it beautiful.” (This was as annoying to my wife as it sounds.) The photo made the backyard beautiful, but it also made it make no sense. And wouldn’t have been at all what our daughter wanted.

Before a machine could help me, we had to figure out what we actually wanted the night to feel like. What were the key features of the backyard that we wanted to highlight? How did we want to use the space?

There are a lot of tools out there now that let you build cool things without any coding knowledge, and they are awesome. But I just read this article about why the author couldn’t get these tools to build the personal writing website he actually needed.

One line stuck with me: “Automation does not solve the absence of process. It amplifies it.” It reminded me of planning my daughter’s wedding reception in our backyard. Turns out vibe coding and wedding decorating require the same thing at the start: a plan.