Will Simon lost a fortune in the FTX collapse, walked away from crypto, and rebuilt using vibe coding.

CFO by day, vibe coder by necessity. Will built a full internal CRM for his payroll company using Lovable—no coding background, just frustration with manual processes and limited dev resources. We dig into his chat mode strategy, why he sees AI having bigger impact than crypto, and his plan to automate every manual payment by next year.

Key topics

Building production tools without developers: from margin calculators to DocuSign clones
Strategic prompting: using chat mode to optimize before implementing
Crypto's decade vs. AI's revolution
The FTX collapse and walking away from trading

Takeaways

Chat mode is your friend: spend 30-40% of prompts reviewing plans before implementation to prevent the AI from chasing the wrong problem
Security matters from day one: even Lovable's built-in review got a B+ from Will's database engineer with minimal tweaks
AI creates jobs, not just kills them: new skills for everyone from founders to entry-level, not replacement
Information access is the real shift: from encyclopedias to Wikipedia to ChatGPT—each step didn't kill jobs, it changed what skills matter
Know when you need real developers: vibe coding gets you 80% there, but production needs cleanup and optimization

Links

The Mainspring

Connect

Christmas with Hamilton Mill Church // Rahul Agarwal