I coded a lie-detector at 3 a.m. My dev called it spaghetti 🍝

_{Day 142/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

Last week I sent over the first version of the VIBE Score - Viewpoint and Individuality.

Think of it as a lie-detector for boring copy: will humans actually feel this, remember it, share it?

Turns out there’s a small galaxy of research papers on why stories light up the brain like Times Square.

So I hot-wired the findings into a scoring model, fired up Lovable, and “coded” with my AI copilot until 3 a.m. for six nights straight.

Ship.
Sip coffee.
Ship again.

I sent the prototype to our dev, feeling proud… then the Slack pings:

Translation: I’d brewed a beautiful pot of spaghetti.

No-code empowers marketers, yes.
It also gifts devs a brand-new pile of gremlins.
I was helping - and I was hijacking the release schedule.

So let’s talk about the moment when the invisible fan meets the very visible mess.

Why I Prototype in No-Code (Even When It Breaks Things)

I wear three hats: head of marketing, head of product, AI vibe-coder.
It’s my job to dream up the thing and drag it into existence.

Could I wait for engineering tickets to cycle through? Sure.
But we’re a small team; playing telephone with product requirements would be a f*cking nightmare.

AND, I love to build shit.

No-code lets us sprint. I can knock together a proof in hours, hand it to devs with actual user clicks baked in, and say “make this real - or tell me why I’m dumb.”

Yes, I create a mess. The mess is a feature. It keeps us moving.
We just need a process that spots the smoke before the sprinklers kick in.

Debug Is a Feature, Not a Phase

No-code tools promise drag, drop, done.
Reality: drag, drop, debug.

Every shiny black-box platform still runs on code written by humans who were under-caffeinated and over-deadline. When you glue two of them together, you inherit both sets of shortcuts.

• Hidden rate limits dressed as “unlimited.”

• Error logs that read like avant-garde poetry.

• APIs that politely nod, then throttle you into 429 purgatory.

Press publish without poking at the seams and the seams poke back - live, in front of customers.

Ain’t No-Code for That

I’ve broken Airtable automations, Webflow CMS exports, Bubble test suites, every Zap ever, and - last week - an entire staging DB the dev team spun up just for me.

Pattern spotted: the common denominator is me.

But here’s the uncomfortable epiphany:

So I now wear an imaginary lanyard that reads QA Gremlin. Every new Penfriend feature runs the gauntlet:

1. Lovable stress test - fake data, real clicks, intentional sabotage.

2. Coffee-and-panic pass - open every tab like a caffeinated raccoon.

3. Dev debrief - “Here’s what exploded, here’s why it was probably my fault.”

Stuff still slips through. That’s software. But the blast radius? Way smaller.

Your $20 Crash Course in Chaos

If you’re a marketer, do yourself (and your devs) a favour: throw twenty bucks at Lovable, Replit, or Claude’s new coding toy and build something.

Pick a tiny idea you wish existed. Hack it together.

You’ll end with a scrappy prototype and a front-row seat to the brutality of software reality - the silent 500s, the race conditions, the “why does it only fail on Tuesdays?” ghosts.

That pain is education.
It’s also pure empathy, and that makes you lethal in product conversations.

Shipping fast is sexy. Fixing faster is survival.

✌️ Tim "Ship Fast, Fix Faster" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Send me what you build. I want to see them. And test them. And break them.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.