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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This article spins the same superficial, overhyped narrative on repeat with its claims that AI can already replace entire teams of content creators and programmers.
AI is incredibly useful as a force multiplier for productivity, but the idea of a solo creator building a “full-stack content pipeline” that outranks Forbes is max hyperbole.
The buzzwords—“vibe coding,” “content machine,” “full-stack,” “agentic systems”—and the lack of technical detail make this article read like an AI-generated marketing pitch or the work of a human serving up thin gruel.
If they are talking about English majors, most of them are liberal.
I've been writing software professionally since 1972, and never once considered myself to be a "coder". Software engineer, hardware engineer, embedded engineer; but, never a "coder". A "coder" is just this side of a keypunch operator, a copy-and-paste artist at best.
Pitiful, derogatory term.
So who’s the creative here them or the program?
I don’t know much about AI but I have a lurking suspicion that it’s going to be involved in some huge tragedy. It isn’t after all actually intelligent.
You can actually run some LLMs on your local machine, using something called “Quantization”, in most cases even though it weakens it somewhat, it’s still good enough to do most of things you want to do.
If you have a certain domain expertise you need for the LLM, you can go to Hugging Face and find an quantized LLM suited for it, that won’t take up a lot of resources. You can also used a locally stored Vector database to add in any data that isn’t included in your LLM into the prompts.
I would say, have a solid foundation in the basics: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP/S, SQL, and mastery of one language, be it Java or Python. Because if you know one language inside and out, it makes it much easier to deal with any other one, because you can simply tell to do the equivalent in the other language, and do it the right way.
One of the best things about using Claude Code for me, is I can easily generate the documentation about what my code does, and it will even point out potentially better ways to do it. That’s why I prefer it over CoPilot.
...been coding since ‘83, as a kid, leading to a career in all sorts of software - embedded systems, web front/back, custom database apps, safety critical systems, graphics rendering engines, that has evolved toward automotive vehicle architecture, where it all comes together.
I agree with many aspects of your post. Things are evolving more rapidly. AI is disrupting. Capabilities are more available to more people, without traditional backgrounds.
That said, they’re not ‘software engineers’. Similarly, when I hear, “today’s kids know how all this stuff works”....no, they don’t, they know how to USE technology that has been made easy to use for non-technical people. E.g. smartphone.
There’s not enough software engineers, especially for industries where safety critical applications are involved....’software is eating the world’. AI enables better productivity - but the appetite for more productivity will only grow because of it.
Yes, the workforce will shift, it always does. I just don’t believe it’ll radically reduce the need for developers, it’ll just spread out the spectrum of skills needed for a greater range of needs. Even for those that do lower-level software, or safety critical systems, AI can help with productivity - but cannot replace (liability). It allows a team to be more productive, when we’ve decades of work to do. I still need more people, not less.
Things like web applications, especially just for presentation, marketing, and e-commerce, are easier targets. Complex custom systems (esp. safety critical) require full completeness of requirements, which has always been the problem - the customer never provides 100% requirement completeness (nowhere close). This is where real skill comes in, deeply understanding the problem. This is where AI falls, at least today.
Nobody knows how this will all play out. AI is accelerating because of AI. I’m not sure where we’ll be in just 5 years. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. What we can’t do is stop educating each generation of how all this stuff actually works, real computer science.
Those aren't "the basics".
Totally agree! It seems few out there, the "coders", actually do not have a clue.
yes I'm beginning to think this narrative is being pushed by the AI companies to entice large companies to buy their products. It's also being used as an excuse for layoffs that would normally cause people to question how well a company is doing.
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