The Red Flags of Vibe Coding a Dating App

Good afternoon, Melbourne. I am here I think that gives a little bit of a hint what I'm gonna be talking about today. I'm gonna start off with a very brow a very direct question. Who here has ever been in love? Oh, quite a few of you.

Now I'm not gonna make you do a lot of homework throughout this talk. Who here who has ever had their heart broken? Me too. It kills, doesn't it? Today, when I talk about vibe coding, we're told ship it, build it, launch it, get it out to market, and that's all well and good. Except there is a lot of things that come into play, especially when the human heart is involved.

I thought I knew everything about dating. I'd been teaching people how to date, how to mate for probably maybe two decades. I'm on my seventh divorce, and I've never been married. That gives you an indication of what I'm talking about. I thought I knew at all. I've read all the text messages.

I've dissect every relationship. I've gone on the journey with so many people. And then AI came along, and I apparently, dating had taught me nothing. I built an AI coach, and her name was Patty. Now for me to tell you the reason why her name Patty was a whole other talk.

Patty is a AI dating coach, and she's been built on old school rules in a modern dating world. How do people date anymore? How do you know what to say? What do you do at 02:00 in the morning when the friendship group is asleep and you've got an urgent message because the guys just text, hey? What do you do?

Confusing a prototype with a product. This is my first red flag. It's easy to build. It's easy to sit there in front of a vibe coding platform thinking you have all the answers. I was led into a false sense of security. I saw the possibility. I even thought I was in love. They behaved perfectly. They performed exactly on cue.

They answered all my questions, and who was I to think that it was anything short of spectacular? But in reality, it was total chaos. Real users started asking for career advice. They were asking, what shoe goes with what skirt? They were asking me, how do I get from here to there?

And I was like, well, that's not what Patty's designed for. She's here to give you love advice and love advice only. A demo is not a product. Real users are the test. Red flag number two. Oh, yeah. My biggest skill was sitting there at midnight with a cup of coffee going, another $20 is gonna kill it for me.

This is it. This $20 has all the answers. I think a $170 is an underestimation of the tokens that I actually purchased building Paddy. But every time, I thought this $20 was it. My greatest skill was pulling out my credit card and entering it at midnight.

Red flag number three. I've got to be honest. I was not monogamous. I dated around, I flirted, and I was not I was I was not really committed. I swiped right, swiped left. I was on every single platform. In fact, I wanna share some of those platforms that I dated.

Emergent was my first love. Oh my god. It told me all the right things, told me how wonderful it was and how it was gonna see me straight, and it had all the answers to everyone's dating problems. Then I went to Skywork. I'm not even sure if Skywork even exists anymore, but they sold me the dream because Emergent started to get cagey with some of its answers, so I jumped over to Skywork.

But then I still wasn't satisfied. Base 44, man, it was shiny and new, and who can resist the shiny and new appeal of a new dating platform? Bolt had super speed, run and charm, and it was like something I'd never seen before. So I hung out with Bolt for a little while, and then Emergent came back. Said I'd done the work, been to counseling, got a new upgrade, had some new features, and was actually ready to commit.

So there I was, red flags, all gone apparently. Emergent and I, this was it. This is the love story. So we continued our relationship, and Patty lives on Emergent. Red flag number four, test testing yourself is fake.

I asked some great questions of my AI dating app. I asked, where would you go on a first date? What do you think are the best places in Melbourne? And it came back with great answers. And it was when the real users got into the chat, and they were asking the simple things. What do you what do you text back when they say, hey?

What do you text back when they say, hey? What happens when they look at my story? Does it mean that they like me? The actual user case are the real things. If if only you test it, you're testing a fantasy. The human stakes completely changed, and Patty got real when my phone pinged at two in the morning.

And it was a holy shit moment. I woke up thinking, now what? There's a real user using this. It changes the game completely. There's data at stake, there's privacy, and there's real answers that people are taking seriously. The actual lesson. Can I build this?

Absolutely. In today's age, with AI, the way it's changing rapidly, anyone can build anything. The lesson is, what am I missing? This is where the product actually lives. The red flags in the assumptions and thinking about what do I need to be looking for? What am I actually missing? Who do I need to speak to to see it from another perspective?

I didn't not ignore the red flags because I couldn't see them.