A quiet shift is taking place in how product teams operate. After initially prioritising the perfecting of the Product Requirements Document (PRD) before coding, some teams are now substituting documents with demos. This change is driven by the rise of vibe coding and is happening in both Big Tech and startups.
Product leaders are now prioritising speed over specification. This isn’t about skipping steps, but about shifting priorities: moving faster by demonstrating instead of explaining, and using prototypes as the new language of collaboration.
From Google’s Gemini team to early-stage founders, there’s a shared view that when development moves as quickly as generating content, there’s little incentive to write before building.
The Decline of the Writing-First Approach
In the past, lengthy development cycles supported the need for longer documents. Scarce engineers, costly iterations, and the importance of planning contributed to this. However, this reasoning is gradually becoming outdated.
As Madhu Guru from Google’s Gemini team stated on X, Google is shifting from a writing-first culture to a building-first one.
Guru noted that writing was once the primary means of demonstrating clear thinking, optimised for scarce engineering resources and long development cycles, which required accuracy before building. Now, prototyping is as quick as writing a PRD, enabling project managers to demonstrate rather than explain. Role boundaries blur as creativity and development co-occur.
“The most successful startup I’ve worked with shipped its minimum viable product in six weeks. The least successful one spent 4 months writing specs for a product that never launched,” Namanyay Goel, founder of Giga AI, told AIM, contrasting two extremes.
Goel states that traditional cost assumptions are outdated. Tasks that once took weeks now only take hours due to AI-powered tools and quick prototyping environments.
Prototypes, Not Paper Trails
He advocates a new approach: skip the 20-page PRD, start with a lightweight demo and one-pager that explains the problem it solves, what it proves, and the metric it hits.
Goel suggests that the working prototype should narrate the story, while the one-pager is reserved for outlining contracts and commitments.
This can be backed by the example of a 91-year-old grandpa vibe coding with Claude.
Eduard Ruzga, staff engineer at Prezi, said prototyping is a natural way to make ideas real, even if it’s early-stage sketching. “I have known for decades that words are not enough. A picture is worth a thousand words. I always create quick prototypes these days to communicate possibilities and goals better,” he said.
But Ruzga also cautions that the method is still forming. “It’s more like doodling where AI is a brush.”
Meanwhile, Goel observes that there are areas where writing still matters, shared schemas, compliance-focused decisions, or significant cross-team efforts. However, he believes these represent only a small part of the overall work.
“The other 80%—the user flows, interaction patterns, and feature discovery—can be prototyped faster than they can be specified,” He said.
Vibe Coding Is Shifting Work Culture?
Vibe coding isn’t just a trend. It’s a fundamental shift in how we work. As build times decrease and AI enhances creativity, teams no longer need to wait for perfect alignment on paper. The playbook is evolving: write less, build more, and let the demo speak for itself.
“The companies still writing elaborate specs while their competitors are shipping will find themselves in the same position as those who insisted on fax machines when email became ubiquitous,” Goel said.
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