A survival guide for founders in the age of AI
Every morning, some AI-native vibecoder promises Mark infinite scale, high EBITDA, and "stakeholder value" with just one prompt.
If Mark falls for the hype, he won't have a company left to scale. Learn to protect your CEO. Or yourself, if the CEO is you.
Mark, the CEO
Jason The Vibe Coder
Episode 0
You caught Mark having a 1-on-1 with a complete stranger, who wants to "generate value" with him.
Episode 1
Scope · which projects to take
Solve this episode to unlock the briefing and references.
Spinning up a demo with AI is the easy part. A real product means handling the edge cases, hardening it for production, and doing the work that a flashy prototype quietly skips.
Chasing a clever idea is easy; finding someone who'll pay for it is the hard part. If a problem isn't already costing people money, a slick demo won't make them want a cure.
Bold bets make better stories than they do businesses. The unglamorous order tends to win: talk to customers, prove it works, then spend, and not the other way around.
Episode 2
Scaling · cost control
Solve this episode to unlock the briefing and references.
Cloud providers give away generous free tiers because they know how hard it is to leave once you've built on them. The allowance gets you comfortable, then usage grows and the bill arrives right when migrating off would cost the most.
Going viral feels like pure upside until each new user also adds compute, bandwidth, and storage you pay for. If costs scale faster than revenue per user, a traffic spike can lose you money at the exact moment it looks like you're winning.
Set hard spending limits before you launch, not after the bill surprises you. Pair them with alerts at 50, 75, and 90 percent, so a runaway service shows up while there's still time to act, not at the end of the month.
Interlude
You catch our "growth guru" trying to sell Mark another success-story scenario.
Episode 3
Security · secrets management
main. The stakeholders need to feel the vision. Don't read the code — just feel the value.Solve this episode to unlock the briefing and references.
AI generates the feature you asked for, not the authentication, access control, and input validation around it. If your plan doesn't name security explicitly, the code won't include it, and most first-time builders don't know to ask.
Keys, passwords, and .env files get committed to public repos and scraped by bots within minutes. Secrets management and a properly locked-down infrastructure setup aren't optional extras; they're the difference between private and breached.
Insecure code runs perfectly, so it sails through a demo and into production unnoticed. Take security seriously from day one, because every new user you gain also makes you a more interesting target to attack.