Most people assume vibe-coding fails because of bad prompts.
The real reason is simpler — and more fixable.
They start building before they know what they’re building.
The Moment That Changed How We Think About AI Building
At the She Builds on Lovable Hackathon, María José Lalama did something that most professionals still believe requires a technical team and months of runway.
She built Vivian — a working app focused on HPV education for women — in 48 hours. No code. No development background. Just a structured method she applied before writing a single prompt.
Vivian wasn’t a rough prototype held together by workarounds. It was a functional product with a defined user, a clear problem, and a coherent scope. It worked because María José knew exactly what she was asking the tool to build before she asked it.
That distinction — knowing before building — is what separates vibe-coding that produces real output from vibe-coding that generates cycles of confusion and revision.
The Real Bottleneck in AI Building
Prompting gets most of the attention in conversations about AI building. And prompting matters — but it’s not where most people lose time.
The bottleneck is earlier.
When your idea is vague, your prompt will be vague. When your scope is undefined, the tool will fill in the gaps — usually not in the direction you intended. When you haven’t done the thinking about who the product is for and what problem it actually solves, you end up iterating on outputs instead of building toward an outcome.
AI tools are fast. That speed amplifies whatever you bring into the process. Bring clarity, and the tool moves quickly in the right direction. Bring ambiguity, and it moves quickly in many directions at once.
The professionals building real products with AI — not just impressive demos — are the ones who learned to do the strategic pre-work first.
The Clarity-First Method™
On May 14, María José will walk you through the framework she developed and tested — the same one behind Vivian.
The Clarity-First Method™ is a structured approach to the thinking that happens before and during building. It covers five stages:
Define your idea — translate vague intent into a specific, buildable concept. Most ideas that fail at the AI stage were never concrete enough to begin with.
Do your research — understand the user and the problem well enough to make real design decisions. AI can help you do this faster, but the judgment is yours.
Set constraints — decide what you are not building. Scope clarity is the single most underrated skill in AI-assisted product development.
Write your PRD and Master Prompt — create the north star document that guides every building decision. This is what keeps the tool aligned with your intent across dozens of iterations.
Start building — with the pre-work done, the building phase is faster, cleaner, and produces outputs you can actually use.
The webinar will include a live demo so you can see the method in practice, not just in theory.
Who This Is For
This session is designed for professionals who want to build with AI — not just use it.
It’s relevant if you are:
- A Product Manager starting to explore vibe-coding and want a structured way in
- A Designer curious about building functional prototypes without a development dependency
- An Entrepreneur with a product idea and no technical background
- A professional in any role who has tried AI building tools, found them disorienting, and wants to understand why
No coding experience required. No prior AI building experience required. The Clarity-First Method is designed to be applied from day one.
About the Speaker
María José Lalama is a Product Manager and Business Analyst at Thoughtworks, and one of the clearest emerging voices in AI product building.
She built Vivian during the She Builds on Lovable Buildathon — a structured 48-hour challenge that proved what’s possible when method meets tooling. She now mentors women through SheHub, working with the next generation of builders as they navigate the same learning curve she crossed.
María José is also an allWomen AI Builder Membership alumna — the programme that taught her to work with AI across her entire professional workflow, not just experiment with it.
Connect with María José on LinkedIn
Event Details
Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2026 Time: 18:00 – 19:30 CET Format: Live webinar — recording available for registered participants who can’t attend live
This is a free event open to the allWomen community and anyone who wants to learn the method.
Register Now
Register for the Clarity-First Method Webinar
Interested in going deeper? The allWomen AI Builder Membership teaches you to work with AI across four capability layers — from prompting fundamentals to strategic application. It’s where María José built the skills behind Vivian.