#6 - Will Simon - From Losing Everything in FTX to Building Production Software Without Code

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

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Vibe Coding is a podcast about building software and reality with AI. We dive into what actually works, share practical techniques, and talk to the people building these tools.  

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