The Payoff

You now have a problem statement, scope and non-goals, user stories, a one-page PRD, a data model, and an ordered task list — the entire foundation of a real project, drafted in minutes with the AI as your sounding board.

None of this required you to know how to code. It required you to know what you wanted and to think clearly for a few minutes — and the AI handled the rest of the thinking out loud with you. That's the real shift: you're not writing software yet, you're writing the intent, and good intent is most of the battle.

Keep this spec in a file in your project (many people use a SPEC.md or PRD.md). It becomes the document you paste into fresh AI sessions to re-anchor context, and the checklist you work down one vibe-sized task at a time. In the next chapter, we'll take the first task and actually build it.