The Aboard Podcast AI Summer School #3: From Agents to Apps
Aug 19, 2025
Adam Pash, CTO at Aboard, joins the discussion on harnessing AI to build apps, emphasizing the blend of structure and flexibility in development. He explores the critical role of digital agents in enhancing user onboarding and provides insights into the balance between systematic approaches and vibe coding. Lively anecdotes reveal common pitfalls in using AI and stress the necessity of 'guardrails' for maintaining control. Overall, the conversation sheds light on the dynamic interplay between AI technologies and human creativity in app development.
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Spec-First Produces Predictable Apps
- Aboard captures the initial product discovery and turns it into a concrete spec before building code.
- That spec-first approach narrows options and makes the final app more predictable.
Demo With A Headphone Company Prompt
- Rich pretends to be a headphone company and prompts Aboard for a warranty-and-repair workflow.
- The system immediately begins a dialog to clarify goals and request contact info.
Blueprints Are Data-Shaped Spec Mad Libs
- Aboard represents apps as a large structured data shape (a blueprint) rather than unstructured prompts.
- Filling that blueprint is like completing a complex Mad Libs that yields a full app spec.