Vibe coding is not a real business model

**Brian Casel** (0:11)
Hello, welcome to The Panel. And we're here without Justin this week, so I don't have the polished intro that he always says, but I'm Brian Casel. I'm the founder of Builder Methods.

**Jordan Gal** (0:22)
I am Jordan Gal, the founder at heyrosie.com, and we have our friend and recurring guest now, Henry Poydar, welcome.

**Henry Poydar** (0:29)
Thanks for having me. I'm Henry Poydar, founder of Steady at runsteady.com. And I guess I took away some of the hair quotient from The Panel this week.
Justin's got a full head.

**Jordan Gal** (0:41)
Justin's the one, he's very nice. He's always been very stylish.

**Brian Casel** (0:46)
Yeah, he's got like the weekly haircut going and-

**Jordan Gal** (0:49)
He dresses nicely? He dresses nicely? I'm always like, wow, imagine dressing nicely. I used to enjoy dressing nicely, and it's impossible to justify at home. It's impossible.

**Brian Casel** (0:58)
I'm just way too comfortable in the sweats. Or now every other day I'm in, it's either like gym shorts or a sweatpants depending on the weather.

**Jordan Gal** (1:05)
You know what's really inspired me is the friends and neighbors.
John Hamm looks so good in a blazer. I'm like, I gotta find more excuses to wear blazers. I know.

**Brian Casel** (1:15)
I'm speaking at a conference in June, and then another one in September, and I'm like, I gotta go shopping to get some real clothes. I gotta be out in the world again. This is crazy.

**Henry Poydar** (1:27)
I mean, we can talk about this a little bit, but the critics for my outfits happen to be my children, right? So, you know.

**Jordan Gal** (1:37)
Always.

**Brian Casel** (1:38)
Yeah.

**Henry Poydar** (1:39)
Tina Fey had a thing where she talked about, it was on some talk show or something, where she talked about how, like, when you've got a teenager, like, it kind of feels like you're dating them, you're trying to, like, impress them, but not show that you really care and you're interested in all of that. And so.

**Jordan Gal** (1:57)
Yes. My wife sent me that clip because she has three daughters.
So she has that feeling of like, we're just going to have dinner, but like, oh, oh, I'm sure you have plans. As like a normal interaction. We're just going to do everything for you, but like you don't have to actually take part.

**Henry Poydar** (2:15)
Yeah. That's extended into my outfits. I'm trying to like just not. I got to critique the other day that my jeans were too tight. It's like that.
That's old school.

**Jordan Gal** (2:24)
Well, this is the first time they're encountering wide leg pants as a trend. So they think they invented it.

**Brian Casel** (2:30)
That's like a new trend. I'm like in the 90s. We're back. Here we go.

**Henry Poydar** (2:33)
It's kind of not a new trend. It's like a couple of years. We're behind.

**Jordan Gal** (2:37)
Yeah. I don't know if it helps our case that we're like, we're so old that that's actually coming back from when we were teenagers. That's how long the cycle has been.

**Henry Poydar** (2:45)
Yes.

**Brian Casel** (2:46)
Well, I never got into the tight skinny jeans. I'm just like, I'm going to stick with the 90s until they come back.

**Jordan Gal** (2:53)
I did that for a while. I always find myself continuously embarrassed of the previous stage of fashion.
I'm like, oh, I like the way these look. What was I thinking previously? Then it's just that on repeat forever.

**Brian Casel** (3:08)
All right. Today, should we talk about business or AI or kids, maybe all of it?
Yeah.

**Jordan Gal** (3:16)
I think we're going to get to all of it.

**Henry Poydar** (3:17)
Yeah. It's all interrelated.

**Brian Casel** (3:21)
Yeah. Why don't we start out with some updates, business side?

**Jordan Gal** (3:25)
Henry, what's new? Last time you were on the pod, you talked a lot about really figuring out how to dial in the narrative around your business and how that extends into the sales process and how that looks on the inside of your customer's organizations. Where has that gone? How has that been turned into marketing material on the sales process and product updates and all that?

**Henry Poydar** (3:51)
Yeah. Lots going on there.
Steady is a coordination platform for teams and for organizations and companies.
And what we've realized from interacting with our customers, we have, of course, tons of AI features within Steady. LLMs are really good at pattern matching. Coordination is about pattern matching and using that to provide guidance and assess risk and things like that. And so that's been obviously been great for our product. But what we are wrestling with is how our customers are using AI, and I think what we've realized that there's, I think Brian, you might have talked about this a little bit. There's two kinds of agents out there. There's what I'll call the single player agent and the multiplayer agent. Single player, in my mind, is the personal assistant, like the agent that works for a person. And it's like a one-to-many relationship. I have right now, I've got seven Cloud and Codex terminal tabs open. Those are my agents. They're doing things. They're working for me. And so that's single player mode. But I think what we're starting to see and what we start to see our customers is the multiplayer mode where you have an agent that's not working for a particular person. It's working for a team or it's working for a company. So something like Charlie or Devin or some of the semi-autonomous agents that are doing like infrastructure stuff and things like that. And those deployments of bigger companies are failing really terribly because they haven't solved the coordination problem. How do you keep these things aligned and in sync? And it's not a performance problem with the tech. It's an alignment problem. And so, okay, well, we have a coordination platform. What can we do there? And so we've been thinking really hard about what it looks like to have an agent in the same coordination loop as humans.