Robert Lavigne treats AI like a dev team that costs $30/month instead of millions in salaries.
Posted on 07/25/2025 8:04:35 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Krista Fabregas never saw herself as a coder. But when she built an AI-powered content automation pipeline to publish an article that outranked Forbes in Google search results—driving visitors to her site instead of the media giant’s— she knew she was onto something.
“That article was fully AI-generated from the start,” she admitted. “I just entered a keyword and sent it to my automation tool.”
A longtime content strategist, e-commerce consultant, and fiction writer, Krista joins a new wave of users building software and automations with artificial intelligence. Many have no programming skills and once felt intimidated by AI tools like ChatGPT, Zapier, and Notion AI.
AI is also at the heart of Robert Lavigne’s work. A seasoned developer with over 40 years of experience, Robert now utilizes AI to simulate a full-stack team of developers, building prototypes and automations in minutes rather than months.
Having watched the evolution of these tools from Lotus Notes to WordPress to GPT-4, Robert sees these AI assistants as collaborators that can reason, iterate, and even self-correct.
“These things can be orchestrating a full-stack deployment,” he said. “Generating code, error handling, API calls, and documentation, all in one go.”
Krista sees it slightly differently. She bases her automations on natural language by providing ChatGPT with clear prompts, utilizing Airtable to structure her ideas, and leveraging Zapier to transfer data between tools.
“I’ve built and deployed full-stack systems by lunchtime that would’ve taken weeks in the old world,” Robert shared.
Robert Lavigne treats AI like a dev team that costs $30/month instead of millions in salaries.
Robert’s secret is that he utilizes these tools not as passive assistants, but as a team whose members each have a specific role. Instead of managing engineers, he feeds the same problem to different models, compares results, and refines outputs.
However, there is a caveat: Robert believes that treating AI as a black box is a mistake, especially when utilizing AI tools in sensitive industries.
“The danger in no-code environments is that people deploy things without understanding what they’ve built,” he warned. “That’s fine if it’s a basic landing page. But if you’re handling payments, health data, proprietary systems—you better know what’s under the hood. Otherwise, you’re sitting on a legal and operational liability.”
That mindset makes Robert’s perspective invaluable. Like other developers, he’s learning to work like an orchestra conductor, directing an array of intelligent instruments to bring ideas to life.
“I’m not just prompting,” he explained. “I’m building systems and letting the models validate and refine each other.”
Krista once found herself needing to produce a surge of articles on tight deadlines. “They asked me to deliver 30 original articles in a week—with no freelancers,” she recalled of a former employer.
Instead of panicking, she used off-the-shelf tools—ChatGPT, Zapier, Airtable, and WordPress—to construct a full-stack content pipeline without writing a single line of code.
Content strategist turned AI builder: Krista Fabregas now creates in minutes what once required a dev team.
Krista’s approach is a textbook example of vibe coding—shaping outputs through tone, structure, and clear intention. Instead of writing code, she crafts prompts and workflows that “feel right,” using natural language to guide the behavior of her tools.
Her journey didn’t stop with long-form articles. She leveraged AI to build a custom WordPress plugin, a content machine that outlined plot points for her fiction writing, and even started prototyping an AI-powered “Choose Your Own Adventure” reader app.
Krista still thinks of herself as decidedly non-technical. What makes her different isn’t coding—it’s curiosity and command of language.
Robert dove back into development after years away once he discovered AI could not only handle repetitive code generation but also debug and explain itself. He’s focused on “agentic systems,” which are AI models that can solve problems and decide how to solve them.
“The model can plan its own steps,” he said.” Instead of just answering your prompt, it says, ‘Here are the next 10 things I should do,’ then executes them in sequence. It’s self-directed problem-solving.”
Krista’s creative awakening is similar. She doesn’t wait for a dev team to greenlight her ideas—she builds the scaffolding herself and asks ChatGPT to troubleshoot, tweak, or walk her through the fix if something breaks.
“It’s been fun seeing what I can create,” she said. “I’ve trained my custom GPTs to match my style and tone.”
While their experience and methods differ, their results speak volumes. They’re launching projects, solving problems, and publishing work at a pace that once required entire departments.
“I’ve worked with enough developers to know they can usually build what you ask for,” Krista said. “What surprised me is how easily I could do it without them. AI helped me build workflows that used to cost tens of thousands to develop.”
These new creators aren’t just coders. They’re people who can speak clearly, think structurally, and aren’t afraid to iterate.
“AI gives us the tools to understand what we’re doing,” Robert said. “But only if we slow down and ask it to teach us.”
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“AI-powered content automation pipeline to publish an article that outranked Forbes in Google search results”
“I know what I like, and I like what I know”
Genesis
Will the illegals be gone in time?
My index fund will ride the wave.
My Take:
I’ve been coding professionally since ~1985. I am extremely bearish on the “software development for hire” industry, including companies like web development, app development and software development firms. And large employers like Amazon and Meta have explicitly said they’re cutting their coding headcount.
the industry as a whole is definitely contracting as a result of both AI coding as well as the increasing quality of DIY solutions like Squarespace for small-business websites.
In fact, we’ve seen this trend several times over the past two decades – when a DIY solution gets “good enough,” we as software engineers basically need to move “up the value chain” and stop trying to compete with DIY. This happened about 10 years ago with Shopify, which allows you to create a good e-commerce site with no code and a few hours of setup. In 2005, I would have charged $10k+ for a site that you can get via Shopify for less than $100/mo today. The DIY tech just didn’t exist back then, so it was costly to set up secure transactions for e-commerce sites. After Shopify was released, we generally moved away from “easy” e-commerce projects.
The same happened with Squarespace over the past few years – there are many clients who paid me $5k+ for simple marketing sites (e.g. a restaurant) where I now just tell them it’s more effective to do it themselves.
Today, we’re seeing the range of what you can “do yourself” as a non-coder expand dramatically. In fact, I see some schools teaching a lesson for AI Consultancy Project students in a couple weeks about vibe coding, which I will simplify to mean “using AI to build real software even though learned how to code just a little.”
It’s awesome, and we’re seeing a lot of students jump from “beginner tech skills” to “building real stuff for clients” without ever having to do the multiple years of study to become a software developer. Of course, there are nuances and drawbacks to this – but it is undeniable that you can build pretty good stuff solely with prompts, without needing to be an expert coder.
Previously, you had to work really hard to be good enough to do this (somewhat boring, repetitive) job, and it was often fun because you got to build stuff (or got paid really well by a prestigious company). Now, everyone can become pretty good at coding in a matter of hours, rather than years. This pushes down the value of software engineering.
While those jobs won’t totally disappear, I think it’s important to recognize that supply of coders (AI and human) is now nearly infinite. The demand may be high, but it is not infinite. That means that the cost / price / value of coding has to go down.
At some point in the near future, we will reach the maximum amount of demand for coders. Then, AI will continue to get better and fill even more of that demand. The only possible outcome of that series of events is that there will be fewer jobs and/or a lower average wage for human software engineers.
In one sense, I’m glad for this revolution (as brief as it may be). AI will only work well with those who can write or speak coherently and to its level. Writing well is becoming a lost art or basic skill. The majority of poeple in our country can’t even parse the difference between the words “then” and “than”. “AI Prompting” will be the new coding, and it won’t give a shit about PRONOUNS.
“They asked me to deliver 30 original articles in a week—with no freelancers,”
Her employers may get 30 AL-generated copyright lawsuits a week.
“Her employers may get 30 AL-generated copyright lawsuits a week.”
I HOPE SO!
My head hurts trying to read this.
A concrete example showing how a specific business benefittrd from this would have been nice.
My brother is a brilliant individual, possessing a genius-level IQ and exceptional language capabilities. He ditched a Wall Street law career and moved to Belgium, creating a successful freelance translation business that lasted about 35 years. In the least 18 months, the bottom fell out of that as AI translation improved. Not that it is as good as the best human translators, but it does an initial pass effortlessly. My brother found that his typical clients were offering him the job of polishing the AI-produced first pass, which meant, on a time basis, reducing his billable hours by 80%. He retired.
From the site “Innovating with AI”.
This is an informercial.
The Tech Bros must be realizing their scam doesn’t have long to live due to the enormous infrastructure and electricity costs.
Here is a web page that I put up with goofy songs about my cat, everything was created with AI tools and put up on a very simple WordPress site...
Grok and ChatGPT can give very good and specific information and even create scripts for installing features in Linux and Windows. They can also help you choose and configure the best software tools for what ever you want to create.
Here is another very simple WordPress website with more AI Cat Music in pictures that is being hosted on my gaming computer. I got the info from Grok to set up an Apache2 Webserver in an Ubuntu Server installation running in a VirtualBox machine in Windows 11 Pro. Grok also told me how to use NoIP.com to have the domain I paid $2.00 for be reachable despite not having a Static IP.
Here is another website that shows mostly various old scanned black and white photos colorized and turned to video.
These sites have no commercial value, but were fun distractions to create. My web hosting service costs only $3.50 a month and allows me to put up to 100 sites up.
Depending on your configuration... you have to play my video shorts once to get them to buffer correctly.
Bfl
I’ve been playing with Claude Code recently, if you know what to tell it to do it’s scary, how good it is. The key is to make sure you build out your projects scaffolding first, don’t let it try to determine which versions of libraries you need, you need to work that out up front, or else you’ll get incompatible libraries.
The scary thing is that instead of having to buy an application, you can just reverse engineer it.
Prompts are going to have to become proprietary, or else someone can just use the same prompts to create their own free copy of the software.
For the unemployed coders, I understand their is huuuuge growth in the American energy sector: coal mining, drilling, refining, etc.
From my very limited experience creating effective prompts for AI tools currently requires some experience and imagination. You get different results with small changes in your prompts. It will be interesting to see how this evolves and the ways that it will affect the necessary training to achieve good results. I have been looking over YouTube videos and books on AI on Kindle Unlimited. One of the introductions of a books on AI had a quote from William Wordsworth, “Your mind's a garden. Your thoughts are the seeds. You can grow flowers. Or you can grow weeds.”
Most of what people create with AI will likely be weeds and not flowers, but it all depends on the person and the prompts that they are able to come up with.
I can’t believe they need a whole power plant just to run these AI systems.
But then what will we do with all those Indian H-1B IT departments?
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