Vibecode Your Leadership
The Case for "Burner Code"
Last week, I confessed to being “lazy” with my notes. I argued that the ROI of organizing files is zero, and that we should treat our Second Brains like data lakes - dumping everything in and using AI to retrieve it later.
This week, I’m doubling down. I’m going to tell you how to be “lazy” with AI empowered automation.
Okay, here’s where the idea came from -
This might not surprise you - most of us hold a rigid belief about leadership: My primary duty is to empower my team to be the force multipliers. If I am heads-down optimizing a Spark join, fine-tuning hyperparameters, or debugging a race condition, I am not looking at the horizon. I am not clearing obstacles for my crew. I am not leading.
As for me, I stepped away from code contribution for a long time - ever since I became a people manager - a loong time ago. It is a principle I was taught early in my career, and one I now pass down to every leader I mentor: You must be the Captain of the Ship.
Now the theory is - the Captain’s role is not to be the best sailor on the rigging or the fastest mechanic in the engine room. The Captain’s role is to stand on the bridge, scan the horizon for storms, and set the bearing. If I am heads-down fixing a piston (or code), no one is steering the vessel. The moment I touch the codebase, I stop being an enabler for my team and start being a bottleneck.
That was the rule. Until recently, when I found a surprising way to do this better - coding. And more precisely, Vibe Coding.
The fact is that with Generative AI, the economics of software creation had fundamentally inverted. I realized that in addition to building proprietary data, I also needed to build my own tools - hyper-personalized, bespoke tools - to navigate the complexity of modern leadership.
I call this practice “Vibe Coding Burner Code for your Leadership” And the output isn’t DTC software. It is something much more powerful for a leader.
The Economics of Burner Code vs Production Assets
Now, for my fellow non-tech leaders, please don’t get scared away by “coding.” It’s actually quite simple. Let me explain.
To understand why you should be building software, you have to realize that “Code” is not a monolith. There are two distinct species, and mixing them up is why most leaders hesitate to start.
Type 1 is the Asset. This is what your engineering team builds. It is designed for customers, which means it lives under the tyranny of the “Usual Suspects”: five-9s reliability, massive scalability, and perfect security. It is expensive because it has to be. It demands rigorous testing, peer review, and maintenance. Its goal is Engineering Excellence.
Type 2 is the Utility. This is what I build. I call it Burner Code because it is designed for speed. The bar here is dramatically lower: “Does it run?” It lives on my laptop, not a server. It doesn’t need to scale to a million users; it just needs to work for one. And the cost isn’t measured in sprints or budget cycles - it’s measured in minutes of “vibing” with an AI. The goal isn’t excellence; it is simply high ROI.
This is the mental shift.
In the engineering world, “Burner Code” sounds reckless. In the executive world, it is a superpower. It’s like a “Burner Phone” - you use it for a specific mission, and when the mission is done, you toss it. You have zero attachment and zero maintenance debt.
If I spend 4 hours debugging a complex script that saves me 5 minutes of work, that is terrible ROI. I should have just done the work manually.
But if I spend 15 minutes prompting an AI to write a messy, ugly script that saves me 10 hours of manual data entry? That is Infinite ROI.
I don’t care if the code is “spaghetti.” I don’t care if it lacks error handling. If it breaks, I don’t fix it - I throw it away and generate a new one.
Here are two examples of how “Burner Code” has force-multiplied my leadership in ways that off-the-shelf software never could.
Story 1 - The Mail Scanner
I had a ghost in my machine. specifically, a folder on my Mac that held 25 years of scanned mail, documents, and insurance policies.
Because I used to be a librarian, they were meticulously organized by date. But because I am human, I could never find anything. If I wanted to find “that one insurance policy from 2014,” I was at the mercy of Spotlight search and my own hazy memory of how I named a file a decade ago. It was dead data. I wanted it alive inside my AI Second Brain (Notion).
The problem was the friction. To fix this consuming Sunday fun meant one of two painful choices:
The Manual Slog: Spend my next 10 Sundays manually uploading and tagging PDFs.
The Software Hunt: Scour the App Store for the “perfect” document management app. I’d spend hours reading reviews, pay a $15 monthly subscription for a slick tool that promises to “organize my life,” and eventually realize it forces me into their rigid structure. I’d be stuck manually tagging files in a proprietary system that doesn’t talk to the rest of my brain.
So, I tried the Burner Code way.
I didn’t write a spec. I didn’t open a Jira ticket. I opened Cursor and typed a prompt as casual as a text message:
> “Hey, I have a local folder of PDFs. Write a script to OCR them, extract the text, and shove them into Notion. Use the file creation date as the property date.”
The AI generated the code. I ran it. It crashed immediately (Notion API rate limits).
In my past life as an engineer, I would have sighed and spent the afternoon reading API documentation to implement exponential backoff.
As a Vibe Coder, I just typed: ‘It crashed. Make it sleep for 1 second between uploads.’
It fixed the code. I hit run again.
Twenty minutes later, while I was sipping my coffee, that ugly, 50-line script chewed through two decades of bureaucratic debris. It indexed my entire financial and legal history into my AI.
Buying a “perfect” software would have cost me a monthly subscription and forced me into a generic workflow that didn’t fit my needs. My Burner Code cost $0, saved me months of manual labor, and was hyper-personalized to exactly how I wanted my archive to work.
Story 2 - Escaping Spreadsheet Paralysis
I was paralyzed by a file named FY26_Org_Model_v4_FINAL.xlsx.
As leaders, we live in these models. We don’t just run them to execute changes; we run them to think. We analyze our teams regularly - not always to take action, but simply to know the terrain. We need to visualize the structure, simulate the “what-ifs,” and play with different configurations to find the one that unlocks the most impact.
But the moment you try to simulate that change, the file becomes a drag. You are trying to answer a simple strategic question - “What happens if we move Data Science closer to the vertically optimized business teams?” - but the tool fights you.
You move a row. A VLOOKUP breaks. You fix the formula. The pivot table for the “Budget” doesn’t refresh. You email Finance to validate the headcount costs. They take 4 days to reply. By the time you get the answer, you’ve forgotten the hypothesis.
The tool was dictating the speed of my thought. This rigid workflow forced me to choose between accuracy (slow) and agility (messy).
So, I tried the Burner Code way.
I realized I didn’t need a spreadsheet; I needed a simulator.
I fed the raw CSV exports into Cursor and asked for the analysis that actually matters to a leader:
> “Ingest these CSVs. Build me an interactive dashboard to track my core health metrics: Span of Control, Location Strategy, Reporting Layers, and FTE/Contractor ratio. Now, make it playable. Let me drag this entire Functional Team to a different VP and instantly see the impact on our ‘Big Rock’ capacity vs. ‘Fast Lane’ throughput. Also, add a toggle: What happens to the budget if I swap the next 5 Data Science hires for Machine Learning Engineers?”
The Result:
Now I didn’t spend the afternoon debugging Airflow DAGs, wrestling with Pandas dataframes, or waiting for a Spark job to spill to disk. I bypassed the entire ETL grind. Thirty minutes later, I had a functioning “Org Sandbox” running in my browser - rendering insights with zero latency.
It wasn’t enterprise software. It didn’t have a login screen. But it allowed me to play “God Mode” with my organization. I dragged cards. I tested hiring mixes. I ran 50 scenarios over lunch in the time it usually takes to debug one Excel formula.
The spreadsheet is the default tool for this, but it is a poor substitute for imagination. The limitation of a spreadsheet isn’t its features; it’s that it cannot read my mind. It forces me to translate my fluid strategic thoughts into rigid static rows. No generic tool, no matter how advanced, can perfectly predict how I want to simulate a specific trade-off or visualize a hiring risk. Some people call what I built “hyper-personalization.” I agree. But ultimately, it works because it is a direct brain dump. It fits the shape of my brain because it came directly from it.
The Death of Im Not Technical
We used to have a valid excuse. We could say, “I can’t solve this because I don’t know how to code.”
That excuse is gone.
The barrier to software creation has dropped from “Years of Study” to “Minutes of English.”
This implies a terrifying new reality for leaders: If you are stuck manually updating a spreadsheet or waiting for your Data Analytics team to build a dashboard, it is no longer a technical limitation. It is a choice.
You are the only person who knows exactly how your brain works. You are the only one qualified to build the tools that extend it.
So stop waiting for a tool that reads your mind. Build the tool that is your mind.
Use it. Drain the value. Throw it away.
Don’t build for the Ages. Build for the Afternoon.
#VibeCoding #Leadership #Productivity #AI #ExecutiveOps #FutureOfWork