Tom Babb: We are live.
Derek Peters: Right.
Derek Peters: We'll give, we'll give folks a few moments to join. I appreciate you being here. We'll get started in just a second.
Derek Peters: I'm gonna post some stuff in the chat, just to get some interaction while we get, as some people are getting in, we're gonna start shortly. I look forward to,
Derek Peters: to going over this lecture with you. Welcome to night school.
Derek Peters: All right, in the chat, you can also put up, put where you're calling from. It's always neat to see where everybody's from and all the different places that it's reaching out to.
Derek Peters: All right, Carl's from Austin, we got some San Francisco area, Nashville.
Derek Peters: Go Rocky Talk!
Derek Peters: Orlando?
Derek Peters: Lincoln, not… oh, gosh, Philippines.
Derek Peters: Dubai. All around the world!
Derek Peters: Got Maryland, got Virginia, nice. I'm from Tennessee, so I think I saw somebody in from Nashville.
Derek Peters: I do have a little draw, so I'm gonna try…
Derek Peters: To not let it get the best of me.
Derek Peters: Alright.
Derek Peters: Brooklyn Alright, while you guys are answering that question…
Derek Peters: We'll go ahead and get started. So, it looks like we've got a good crowd with us. I want to start by introducing myself. My name is Derek Peters.
Derek Peters: I work with the product engineering team here at Gauntlet.
Derek Peters: I have 15 years in engineering, planning, and go-to-market, experience.
Derek Peters: and I'm from Tennessee, and one of my biggest hobbies is I love to go fly fishing.
Derek Peters: So, today, and what brings you here today is, for tonight's night school.
Derek Peters: I want to talk about… kind of take a step back from coding, developing, and…
Derek Peters: Everything that we're willing as engineers to just jump right into the mix.
Derek Peters: And just take a step back and realize that you're not just building it, you're getting it launched.
Derek Peters: And… What does that mean?
Derek Peters: So that's exactly what we're going to talk about tonight.
Derek Peters: So… Let's go ahead and go to the next slide.
Derek Peters: So, here's the shape of the next hour.
Derek Peters: We open with why building products just changed, and the methodology that we followed.
Derek Peters: Then, we'll take a look at 3 important pieces.
Derek Peters: All in one real product.
Derek Peters: So, we're gonna touch base on planning.
Derek Peters: So that's turning an idea into a vision document, a product requirements document, also referred to as a PRD, and then a roadmap
Derek Peters: the AI could actually build from.
Derek Peters: And then we'll talk about prompting.
Derek Peters: you are only as good as your prompt, so I feel like now, like, it's a mix between prompt engineering and engineering. Prompting is very important.
Derek Peters: As you steer where your product is going.
Derek Peters: So you're driving the build straight out of those documents. And then we'll talk about… we'll touch base on shipping.
Derek Peters: Release. How do we measure it and close the loop?
Derek Peters: And then, we'll also have some time for Q&A. We're also monitoring… oh, I just saw somebody from Denver, nice.
Derek Peters: We're… ADD moment. But by the end, you'll see exactly which
Derek Peters: Of these three are often skipped, and why they need to go together.
Derek Peters: And I'd bet money it was one that you may have bookend and just forgot about.
Derek Peters: So let's dive in.
Derek Peters: So we're gonna start here, because it reframes everything else. So, for decades.
Derek Peters: The bottleneck in building software was typing.
Derek Peters: was coding, was executing. Turning a decision into working code, took weeks.
Derek Peters: Well, now, with all the great technologies that are out there, That's gone.
Derek Peters: So look at these two bars.
Derek Peters: It's the same timeframe. It's the same week, or sprint, or however you operate. It's the same team.
Derek Peters: So, the old way.
Derek Peters: That whole week brought you one shift feature, or that whole sprint brought you one shipped feature.
Derek Peters: The new way, the typing collapses.
Derek Peters: So, in the very same week you ship, you can ship, let's say, 3 features.
Derek Peters: three times the amount of work. In some cases, four and five. It depends on how good you are at planning.
Derek Peters: And hopefully this will help you become a better planner and separate vibe coding from being a product
Derek Peters: Have some product sense, and kind of go into… That development phase.
Derek Peters: So, it's being ruthless and planning before, and then shipping after. So that's the line between what I mentioned before, VOB coding, let's say VOB coding a slick demo.
Derek Peters: And actually building a product That users are going to utilize.
Derek Peters: So here's the methodology that we're going to use tonight.
Derek Peters: I call it the AI-first product loop.
Derek Peters: And it's just 5 moves. You frame the vision, that's your product vision document, You define the requirements.
Derek Peters: And that's your PRD. You sequence the work, that's your roadmap build.
Derek Peters: And then you go into building. That's where you finally prompt the AI and work on shipping those incremental releases.
Derek Peters: And at that point, you're in… you release and you measure. But the most important part of this whole diagram is the arrow that loops back.
Derek Peters: So… So everything that you learn in production feeds to the next vision.
Derek Peters: So notice the mapping along the bottom frame.
Derek Peters: Define the sequence.
Derek Peters: well, yeah, define and sync what's all that lives inside of planning. The first 3 to 5 moves
Derek Peters: Spent before you write a single prompt?
Derek Peters: And… So, prompting is one move, shipping is one move.
Derek Peters: plus the loop home, so it kind of goes in full circle. Keep that picture in your head, because every slide that we go through, everything that we discuss tonight.
Derek Peters: is going to be… it's going to come up, and it's going to frame together nicely. And it's a loop, it's not a line.
Derek Peters: So, Learn feeds straight back into frame, so your second version is always sharper than your first.
Derek Peters: And then pretend you could get, you know, the whole thing at once. This assumes you won't.
Derek Peters: And the builds are… as we get into the building piece, we'll kind of get into that cadence, so…
Derek Peters: Let's talk about…
Derek Peters: making it real. So, I'm gonna use, you know, a product that I'm gonna reference back to. It's a fictional product, but it is a real product that could be created. So, tonight's product is Cadence.
Derek Peters: It's a task tracker with AI built in.
Derek Peters: So, think of it as, like, you pasted all this chaos in your head.
Derek Peters: The half-thoughts, the… everything that you want to accomplish.
Derek Peters: All the to-dos that you have to do across notes and chats and everything that you have to do in, you know, your day-to-day work environment.
Derek Peters: And cadence turns it into a clean, prioritized list in seconds.
Derek Peters: Now, I picked it for a couple reasons. Everyone lives this pain every day. Your tasks are spread across notes, messages, maybe some post-it notes.
Derek Peters: And your own memory, and let's say.
Derek Peters: Yeah, they exist here, and sometimes you forget them because you get sidetracked, or you see some squirrels.
Derek Peters: But…
Derek Peters: It's hard to keep up with.
Derek Peters: So I picked that because it's a real pain point for a lot of us.
Derek Peters: And two, there's some real depth into this. You're asking a model to read a messy human input, and then hand back something structured and trustworthy, which is exactly where AI products get hard.
Derek Peters: And there's an end state on the right. That's a brain dump in, prioritize task list out.
Derek Peters: And…
Derek Peters: as I'm planning this, or taking, like… and I'm gonna take you through the steps that I would go through in planning this.
Derek Peters: But we'll trace the first feature from ideation to ship. And because every prompt and every result is right here on the slides.
Derek Peters: the experience that I want you to get is understanding the workflow, and… and the reason why I didn't want to make it a live exercise is
Derek Peters: It's difficult to follow watching others type, so…
Derek Peters: Let's talk, you know, before we touch, like, a single tool, or talk about a single tool.
Derek Peters: The most important choice of the night.
Derek Peters: There's two ways to build with AI.
Derek Peters: And they start with the same prompt.
Derek Peters: But they end completely different places.
Derek Peters: So, on the left is VOB coding.
Derek Peters: You open chat, you type, build me a task app.
Derek Peters: And chase whatever comes back.
Derek Peters: Your prompt after prompt, You're burning tokens.
Derek Peters: It's intoxicating, it's draining, and while it is fast.
Derek Peters: really all you're getting is a… is a demo. There wasn't a whole lot of thought, a whole lot of planning behind it. And the problem is, you end up somewhere that you can't explain. And this is where I find engineers
Derek Peters: struggle sometimes, because it is so easy to… like, with all the tools that are out there, it's so easy to just get in there to start typing, and not understand the why.
Derek Peters: So, you gotta be the master of the ship as you're coding.
Derek Peters: As you're prompting, as you're planning. Planning, to me, is the most important aspect of engineering.
Derek Peters: And you still have to plan. You can use all the resources and tools out there to kind of help bounce ideas off
Derek Peters: And we'll get into that tonight.
Derek Peters: On the right, though, we… you know, is what we actually teach here at Gauntlet.
Derek Peters: Plan, and then prompt.
Derek Peters: you decide… The, you know, you decide what's… what's the best first, you know, what's best going forward.
Derek Peters: And then… You flesh out the vision, you flesh out the requirements, you create a roadmap.
Derek Peters: You create your architecture diagram, and then…
Derek Peters: Once you have all those rich.
Derek Peters: documents going in, then AI can help you
Derek Peters: Build from those documents, and now you can steer.
Derek Peters: And be a product manager, and let…
Derek Peters: The agents be your development team.
Derek Peters: Now, here is probably one of the most common things that people miss.
Derek Peters: It's… it's not slower.
Derek Peters: Same model, same speed, But between Vive Coding and planning, Let's see, is prompting…
Derek Peters: Yeah.
Derek Peters: You can even… you can even bounce some ideas off it and have it create better prompts.
Derek Peters: Absolutely.
Derek Peters: It's the workflow wrapped around it, so… The biggest miss…
Derek Peters: that I usually, or typically see, it, it, well…
Derek Peters: Let's… let's get into talking about it.
Derek Peters: And I also want to talk about what we actually use per stage.
Derek Peters: And I want to talk about tooling, for example, because it is important.
Derek Peters: And it's usually the first thing that people want to, like, dive into and ask.
Derek Peters: And it's the workflow that matters.
Derek Peters: Far more than, let's say, the brand of tooling that we use.
Derek Peters: So, for planning, you won't… A good frontier reasoning model.
Derek Peters: So, like, Claude, Opus, GPT, you can even use Sonnet for just bouncing ideas.
Derek Peters: Gemini, you know, whatever you got handy, those are all great tools to kind of help start for planning.
Derek Peters: And I run it in Cloud Desktop, or sometimes I'll bounce it off just to… I'm always in the mindset, trust but verify I'm not bounce it off a GPT with a product so that my vision and my requirements ride along in every message.
Derek Peters: And then for prompting, this is where you move into an agenic coding tool.
Derek Peters: And there's really two camps right now. So you have Anthropic's Cloud Code, you have Codex, and you do have Cursor.
Derek Peters: But… it's a whole new system. It's a terminal command line interface, so it's a CLI,
Derek Peters: And an extension that lives inside Cursor and VS Code.
Derek Peters: Cursor itself is the editor, a lot of people build in it.
Derek Peters: But, you know, use a strong model. So Claude Sonnet or Opus is good, or GPT 5.5,
Derek Peters: for real building. So, like, whenever you're actually… you get into your building, those three LLMs are really strong for, helping you code and turn those ideas into something that real users can use.
Derek Peters: So, let's go ahead and kick this off with planning. So, this is… this is the first and most important step, in my mind.
Derek Peters: So… I'm going to… Ask you to do something that feels… feels backwards, And let's talk about speed.
Derek Peters: Because in the world of AI-first development.
Derek Peters: It's go faster, go faster, ship, submit, go faster, go faster.
Derek Peters: You're still going fast, but take a step back and slow down.
Derek Peters: The single biggest predictor of whatever an AI build
Derek Peters: Succeeds is how much thinking happened before the chat window ever opened.
Derek Peters: When a build goes sideways, 9 times out of 10, it's because someone asked the model to invent a plan, or to do the planning for them based off of a couple words.
Derek Peters: I'm looking at the chat.
Derek Peters: So, Mark asked, how do you choose between the three agents? One front-end or back-end? Well, so…
Derek Peters: Usually, I'll start with, like, Claude Code.
Derek Peters: And, like, when I'm in my development phase.
Derek Peters: Of what I want to accomplish, and it does a pretty good job with both back-end and front-end.
Derek Peters: But we'll definitely get into that in the shipping piece.
Derek Peters: So, so, for the next few minutes.
Derek Peters: We'll take a look at,
Derek Peters: You know, 3 short documents that…
Derek Peters: will help you be better planners along the way. That's the vision document, requirements document, and a roadmap.
Derek Peters: And…
Derek Peters: Only then do you want to prompt. No code yet. This is just thinking out loud on paper and know what the objection is and what you're trying to accomplish.
Derek Peters: So, you start with a vision document.
Derek Peters: So, before features, before Roadmap, You write out your vision document.
Derek Peters: One page on why this exists, and who's it for?
Derek Peters: What problem are we trying to solve?
Derek Peters: Who's gonna benefit from it?
Derek Peters: And here's the cadence on the right.
Derek Peters: So, the vision.
Derek Peters: Turn the chaos in your head into a clear, prioritized plan.
Derek Peters: So the user, the core problem. Tasks live everywhere, and…
Derek Peters: Prioritizing can sometimes be a constant manual work.
Derek Peters: And the one metric that matters?
Derek Peters: Plan task… planned tasks are actually completed. That's all that matters, is what you plan gets completed.
Derek Peters: And then… and principles, so which, you know, let's say, which, for a tool that you live in all day.
Derek Peters: means calm, trustworthy priority, and you always stay in control. Now, how do you write this with AI?
Derek Peters: You do not ask to invent your vision.
Derek Peters: One thing that I like to do, and I have an example here, is…
Derek Peters: I ask it to interview me.
Derek Peters: if I'm getting blocked in my mind, like… and look…
Derek Peters: Kind of look how the prompt is built, like, act as a product coach.
Derek Peters: One question at a time.
Derek Peters: Don't invent the answers.
Derek Peters: And push back… You know, have it push back when you're vague, like, when you're vague.
Derek Peters: That's a planner's prompt, not a wish.
Derek Peters: And the card beside it is…
Derek Peters: what it came back with. A PVD.
Derek Peters: So… let's say, through that conversation. So, act as a product coach. Interview me one question at a time.
Derek Peters: about cadence.
Derek Peters: the user, the core problem, the metric that matters, and the three principles. Then draft a one-page PVD. Don't invent answers if I'm vague.
Derek Peters: Push back until it's sharp.
Derek Peters: And then have it interview you.
Derek Peters: And go through, and then that way you can kind of get all the stuff that's in your head kind of out there.
Derek Peters: And you also give it direction, and now it knows exactly what role it has to play, and in return, it's going to help you flesh out that vision.
Derek Peters: I do that all the time, like, if I'm struggling to,
Derek Peters: to kind of get what… what I'm thinking about. I… I… instead of just…
Derek Peters: typing, and then have it respond, and then keep going back, I have it interview me. I give it a… I give it a title, and have it interview me.
Derek Peters: It really depends, so this is for Mark.
Derek Peters: I do like the kind of the interview flow, where, like.
Derek Peters: we take it one bit at a time. The LLMs have gotten to a point now where you could probably do everything all at once and answer all those questions, but for the way that I process information, it's good for me to get it back, you know, kind of turn by turn.
Derek Peters: And… answer, and then have it clarify, answer again.
Derek Peters: But you could have it go to ask question user flow. My preference is turn by turn, just because I know how I work and operate, and that works best for me. So whatever works best for you, but that's a great question.
Derek Peters: So let's talk about, turn a vision into a PRD.
Derek Peters: So this is where you're… this is where you're defining and kind of fine-tuning. So the vision is a way… well, I'm sorry, the vision is the why, the PRD is the what. So anytime that you're developing, anytime that I'm thinking about what I'm going to do, I always want to…
Derek Peters: I always want to ask myself, why am I doing this?
Derek Peters: And then get into… what? What are we doing?
Derek Peters: That satisfies the why.
Derek Peters: You can even go back to, like, the user story logic. As a user, I want to do this, so that I can do that.
Derek Peters: Because that way you have the who, The what and the why.
Derek Peters: But… And, and you have one ver… you know, let's see…
Derek Peters: You have the vision, which is the why, the PRD, which is the Y, and only for version 1, you have the PRD. So, the prompt on this slide, and I want you to… I want to call this out. Notice how much instruction I'm packing into my prompt.
Derek Peters: Because that's the whole difference between a vague ask, that's the difference between vibe coding, and a useful one. That's really going to drill down, it's actually going to save you some time, too, from tokens, the clearer that you can be with the LLM and interact with it. The lot…
Derek Peters: you're going to get a more richer response. So I'll point the model at the pvd.md.
Derek Peters: As the single source of truth.
Derek Peters: And… I name the exact sections that I want.
Derek Peters: and then… well, and I… what I want to do is I name the… not only do I name the exact sections that I want back.
Derek Peters: I have 3 to… you know, give me 3… 3 to 5 user stories.
Derek Peters: Give me in scope versus out of scope, and measurable success.
Derek Peters: Because that's what you need to do as a product planner.
Derek Peters: I'll tell it to cut anything that's non-essential.
Derek Peters: And park it under out of scope.
Derek Peters: And I saw the comment in the… yes, that's… I always do that because…
Derek Peters: Sometimes we tend to take on more than we can chew, and knowing clearly on the front end what's out of scope and what's in a scope can help as you develop. And then you can set some stretch goals.
Derek Peters: And then I sequence with a roadmap.
Derek Peters: So, this is…
Derek Peters: This is what I refer to, you know, in the planning phase, this is what I like to call sequence. And you're turning that PRD into a roadmap.
Derek Peters: It's… And people often get confused, like, this is not a wish list, this is, like, hard must-haves.
Derek Peters: You might have nice-to-haves on the back end somewhere, kind of listed as your stretch goals.
Derek Peters: But this… this is not a wish list sorted by what sounds fun.
Derek Peters: And this is where a lot of people, when they're planning, they miss out. Like, sequence by risk and value.
Derek Peters: And notice the prompt does the thinking for the model. So, sequence by risk times value.
Derek Peters: Not by excitement, Because you're only in the infancy of this planning.
Derek Peters: And put only the riskiest assumptions work in now?
Derek Peters: and demand… you could demand, like, a one line of rationale per item if you need help making a decision on where to move forward. But here's the roadmapap that it gave back. And just so you all know, like, I went through this exercise, and…
Derek Peters: condensed the output, but what you're seeing is the output. Now, next, later.
Derek Peters: So…
Derek Peters: And that's a really great tool to follow, because that way it keeps you on track, and it keeps you… keeps a nice sequence as you go into developing.
Derek Peters: Yes, when I do this, they live in a GET repo.
Derek Peters: And, they're usually README files, MD files, that I put into a docs folder.
Derek Peters: But you could put them in,
Derek Peters: Notion or whatever other tool that you would like to utilize, but I mostly keep them in my repo. That way, I can always have everything in one place.
Derek Peters: The next question is, how do you communicate with the dev teams? The way that I communicate to the dev teams is, during stand-ups, or let's say there's
Derek Peters: like, a once-a-week product, like, a planning session to, like, for plan… like, you have, like, a product planning session where you decide, like, what tasks are going to get worked out.
Derek Peters: that is typically, like, an hour long, and then we follow up with, like, daily stand-ups. Just like a scaled, Agile or,
Derek Peters: kind of a scrum framework, like, none of that really changes. What changes is how much you plan for your sprint in this new world of…
Derek Peters: technology.
Derek Peters: Yeah, they would appear into, into the, like, whatever repo is for, like, the product or the feature that you're working on. Typically we keep them in the… you would want to keep it in the repo themselves, like, of the product repo.
Derek Peters: And then they can access those. Now, those were some great questions. Thank you so much.
Derek Peters: Okay.
Derek Peters: And the last planning move, and it… this is where it kind of compounds. You've got 3 documents now.
Derek Peters: Don't paste them into the chat and lose them.
Derek Peters: put them into a durable context file that AI reads every single time, And here's… Here's cadence.
Derek Peters: This is the product that we're working on. So it points to the vision document, and points at version 1 of the requirements document. Because remember, this is… the reason why this is V1 is this is the first iteration of this product.
Derek Peters: This is an… it's an ideation, that's where we started. Now we got something kind of fleshed out.
Derek Peters: Yes, we're definitely going to get into that, Christian.
Derek Peters: Not so much the architecture, because this is more product planning for tonight, but but yeah, we'll talk about prompting.
Derek Peters: That that'd be next.
Derek Peters: And…
Derek Peters: So the PVD points to version 1 of the PRD, because that PRD is a living document, it's going to change as more requirements come about, and as you get… as you continue to progress your product.
Derek Peters: and one rule that really matters for the… you'll also, like, let's say in that, PRD, as one thing, one thing that might live in there is, like.
Derek Peters: We'll have the definition of done, and then,
Derek Peters: maybe, like, whatever AI or whatever features that you're planning to, to integrate.
Derek Peters: But the beauty of this is, I never have to re-explain what… Cadence is, again.
Derek Peters: And every prompt inherits the vision and the scope automatically.
Derek Peters: it… it gets treated like code, especially, and this is the beauty of having it in your repo, into a, like, a separate Docs version, or into a… I'm sorry, into a separate docs folder.
Derek Peters: And you can version it, and then you can tell it, like, which version to go. Like, you could have multiple
Derek Peters: Iterations of it as you continue.
Derek Peters: But you can version it, you can review it, you can keep it current.
Derek Peters: A stale context file can be dangerous.
Derek Peters: So, make sure that it's always pointing to the right documentation.
Derek Peters: Because the model will trust it completely.
Derek Peters: And… You being kind of the captain of that ship, and kind of making sure that it's on track?
Derek Peters: Definitely, I would recommend using version control.
Derek Peters: But this is all V1, because this is a new idea.
Derek Peters: So let's talk about prompting.
Derek Peters: Yeah, you can convert anything to an ELD.
Derek Peters: there was a question in here that I saw. Do you manage memory separate from PRD or PVD? I typically just use version control, so it knows which one to point to.
Derek Peters: And then I'll archive. I don't know if you can elaborate on that question, Mark.
Derek Peters: I'll be more than happy to answer it.
Derek Peters: But let's get into prompting. So prompting, this is the part that…
Derek Peters: I hope a lot of you get out of this.
Derek Peters: But we wrote 3 documents before getting here.
Derek Peters: Three of the five moves in the loop that we talked about, you know, going back to the methodology.
Derek Peters: And now those documents pay off enormously.
Derek Peters: So the mental model that I want you to adopt
Derek Peters: You are not a user of the model.
Derek Peters: You are the tech lead. You are a product manager of that model. So clear intent goes in, reviewable work comes out.
Derek Peters: And you put your name on all of it. Everything in…
Derek Peters: And this next section is about getting the signal in and keeping the loop tight enough that you never lose control of it.
Derek Peters: Oh, yeah, yeah, you can do that. Sometimes you can also cache some of that, but yes. No, that's good.
Derek Peters: Thank you, Mark.
Derek Peters: Alright, so let's get into it here. So, a re… a weak prompt…
Derek Peters: And we've all started here when AI first came out, and we're like, oh my gosh, what can we do with this? And we just, like, asked it all kinds of crazy questions, but it's… has evolved to a powerful tool that we all use today. But a weak prompt says, build
Derek Peters: let's say, build the AI thing that makes tasks.
Derek Peters: Or build me a task management system.
Derek Peters: A strong prompt says three things in one… Breath.
Derek Peters: what do you want? The constraints it has, you know, the constraints it has to respect.
Derek Peters: And you'll know both, or you'll…
Derek Peters: you'll both know it's done. Or…
Derek Peters: How you'll… like, how do you know it's done?
Derek Peters: It will tell you that. And the highest leverage habit
Derek Peters: There is, ask for a plan before any code.
Derek Peters: The anatomy is… On the slide here.
Derek Peters: Intent, context, rules, and acceptance.
Derek Peters: So, what and why in one sentence.
Derek Peters: Files, stack, patterns to follow.
Derek Peters: straight from the PRD, or a context.md, or a context.md.
Derek Peters: and accept the PRD's own success metrics.
Derek Peters: You make the model show you its plan first, That way, you understand
Derek Peters: Clearly, what's going to happen next, and then you can help kind of direct it and guide it where to go.
Derek Peters: I haven't used plan mode yet. I may give that a try, but I usually do, I usually put it into, like, a project folder, and then plan, and then transfer it into GitHub.
Derek Peters: Using, Quad Desktop. That's my preferred method. I'm not saying that's the method to use. Everybody…
Derek Peters: This kind of flows regardless what you want to have.
Derek Peters: And I'm learning from you all just as much as I hope you're learning from me.
Derek Peters: That's good.
Derek Peters: forward slash goal.
Derek Peters: In Codex, alright.
Derek Peters: So, once the plan's approved, you have a model… well, you… you hand the model a map.
Derek Peters: And the map literally… well, and the map is literally the prompt on the slide, so walk through it. First, I pointed at the docks.
Derek Peters: Read the PRD and the context file.
Derek Peters: because… Because the docs are the spec.
Derek Peters: You're basically feeding it everything it needs.
Derek Peters: And the exact files to touch.
Derek Peters: And an existing pattern to follow.
Derek Peters: That one line is worth a whole paragraph of style notes.
Derek Peters: So the… the rules come straight from the PRD.
Derek Peters: return, return type JSON, Set the priority and the urgency in the text. Never invent a due date.
Derek Peters: And it's also a great failsafe for bad output.
Derek Peters: then…
Derek Peters: let's say, then done when is the PRD's own success metric. So, a prioritized edible list in under 5 seconds.
Derek Peters: Plus…
Derek Peters: the tests that have to pass, because that's another thing, when you don't properly plan, a lot of people don't realize
Derek Peters: Oh, you mean I have to do testing? That's just as important as planning, like, once you get to the end, then you're ready to test and roll it out to real users?
Derek Peters: So… Now you have everything that you need to go forward.
Derek Peters: So I'm just feeding the model the documents we already wrote, the PRD is the prompt.
Derek Peters: On the next slide, we'll watch what happens, let's say, when you skip all of this. And let's… let's talk about, like, a good prompt versus a bad prompt.
Derek Peters: So this slide… Is that the problem?
Derek Peters: you'll see there's a good prompt versus a bad one, and again, we've all been there, like, especially when AI started rolling out, and then it started getting a lot more richer, and then now it's a tool that we use every day.
Derek Peters: So, on the left is the bad prompt. Add an AI feature that turns notes into tasks. Make it smart.
Derek Peters: And here's what you actually get. You know, what you get is it splits text into breaks. It will deliver you something that does somewhat work, you get excited, but there's no real proof behind it.
Derek Peters: And then on the right is an example of a good prompt.
Derek Peters: Implement, extract, and prioritize PRDV1,
Derek Peters: You can point it to it. You can, you don't even have… you don't have to give it its… the whole file path, unless you have multiple versions. Especially in the first prompt, you want to be clear on, like, where it pulls from.
Derek Peters: And then… return type JSON title priority due, except brain dump.
Derek Peters: edible list in less than 5 seconds, plan first, no code until I approve. That's important, because if you're running auto mode, or something that just kind of goes on its own.
Derek Peters: You lose a little sense of control, even though it can do something really awesome and really cool, and you're like, oh, wow, this is… this is creating something.
Derek Peters: Always ask it to approve.
Derek Peters: Don't… don't just have it go and create a bunch of stuff.
Derek Peters: So here's the rhythm that keeps it on the rails.
Derek Peters: Ask, review, test, refund, and repeat.
Derek Peters: Small differences over big rewrites.
Derek Peters: every time.
Derek Peters: Because a small diff is something you can actually verify. Read every line. I know it's tempting to skim, or skip, or just be like, yeah, get what I needed and go forward.
Derek Peters: and… It looks confident, but you own this.
Derek Peters: Not the model. So, like, if… now, if you're doing something on your own, just to help yourself out, that's fine, but if you're… if you're shipping something that users are going to use.
Derek Peters: Read it.
Derek Peters: Even if it looks confident.
Derek Peters: If, you know, the product that we're working on.
Derek Peters: If Cadence quietly buries, call someone back.
Derek Peters: That's an important task at the bottom as low priority.
Derek Peters: the AI is not the one who has to answer for it. If you miss a task, and you're creating, let's say, this task management system.
Derek Peters: And it's… Not prioritizing right, or taking these tasks and doing what it's supposed to with them.
Derek Peters: then that's… The person that develops its issue.
Derek Peters: And…
Derek Peters: let's say, the move that people that I see come through, that people resist most, is when the model gets stuck and starts circling. Don't argue with it.
Derek Peters: Just reset the context, open with a clean chat, start fresh.
Derek Peters: And I know that, I mean, as good as these models are that are out here today, they can still get confused, they can still hallucinate. Arguing with a confused model just trains it to be confidently wrong.
Derek Peters: at you. So, and… If you're using Clyde, sometimes it's very confident.
Derek Peters: And you just gotta restart.
Derek Peters: And just kind of reset the context.
Derek Peters: Yeah, I do manually reset the context window, or I'll, I'll have, like…
Derek Peters: a golden prompt that I can use to kind of start a new chat and put it in there. So, like, I'll save some prompts in the back end.
Derek Peters: That's true, codecs compacting, that is such a great feature. Absolutely. And just have it compact the con… and do the context resetting itself, that is pretty solid.
Derek Peters: What's happening?
Derek Peters: Good feedback.
Derek Peters: So, before we ship, Let me name 4 ways this all falls apart.
Derek Peters: Because over a long session, You know, you went through all of this… You'll fill the form.
Derek Peters: So… One, a 600 line diff.
Derek Peters: You can't review.
Derek Peters: Well, one, because it's 600 lines, so you don't, you just trust it.
Derek Peters: Two, confident code that reads beautifully, and
Derek Peters: It's quietly wrong. So you still need to go through it and just…
Derek Peters: Check. Testing, too. Make sure you embed testing into your planning.
Derek Peters: Three, arguing with the stuck model with the context rots into mush. You're just kind of going downhill, you're not going to win that battle.
Derek Peters: Looks like you all have ran into this at some point with the context window and having to reset it, which is fantastic.
Derek Peters: But keep in mind, the model didn't fail.
Derek Peters: The workflow did.
Derek Peters: And the fix is always the same three things.
Derek Peters: smaller ask, Read the changes.
Derek Peters: And implement or incorporate some sort of acceptance test as you're going through this.
Derek Peters: when you're… when your AI sessions fall apart, And it will come back…
Derek Peters: And just remember that, like, just kind of reset the context, remind it what it's doing, remind…
Derek Peters: remind… yeah, reminded what it's doing, and just kind of move forward. Don't get aggravated, as aggravating as it can be, but
Derek Peters: And keep your prompts clean and informative.
Derek Peters: Yes, don't let it compact.
Derek Peters: So let's talk about shipping.
Derek Peters: So this is where AI-built products quietly… Can, if they're…
Derek Peters: Vibe-coded, or no thoughts behind it, this is where they go to die.
Derek Peters: It might be a beautiful demo on someone's laptop, never reaches a single user.
Derek Peters: Because shipping started to feel scary, started to feel a little nervous.
Derek Peters: So we're going to…
Derek Peters: my goal is not to make shipping sound boring, but my goal is, you know, let's start small, let's flag it, let's measure it. The entire goal of shipping, and if we go back to, like, let's say Cadence, as an example, or task management software.
Derek Peters: you know, the first slice in front of real people without anyone in the building holding their breath. Like, you want to make it to where, like, hey, I want to demo this to a user, or I'm going to go in.
Derek Peters: Shipping is… this proof of concept, getting feedback, getting real user feedback. So let's talk about the ship
Derek Peters: Ship behind a flag.
Derek Peters: So… The trick to shipping fast?
Derek Peters: Is not shipping fast, fast, fast, fast.
Derek Peters: And what I mean by that is, just… It's okay to submit, but… Going too fast?
Derek Peters: can sometimes cause problems. But the secret to shipping fast is shipping small, and shipping often.
Derek Peters: So… with feature flags, And with feature flags.
Derek Peters: That's what makes it… makes it safe.
Derek Peters: You have those small little iterations that you can ship out.
Derek Peters: But you're shipping in small chunks. You're shipping often, and you're testing those.
Derek Peters: So let me say what shit behind the flag actually means. Well, what it means to me.
Derek Peters: Because, to me, it's the whole foundation of the slide that you're seeing right now.
Derek Peters: A feature flag is just an on-off switch wrapped around your new code.
Derek Peters: If the flag is on, Run a new extractor. If it's off, don't.
Derek Peters: You deploy the code to production with that switch turned off.
Derek Peters: It lives… well, it lives on the server.
Derek Peters: But it's invisible to users until you decide to flip it.
Derek Peters: So… Shipping and turning on becomes two separate reversible steps.
Derek Peters: And that's what takes the fear
Derek Peters: Yeah, it takes the fear out of releasing.
Derek Peters: So, you merged unfinished work, Because it's switched off in production.
Derek Peters: That keeps Maine reasonable at all times.
Derek Peters: Which means you are never trapped in, let's say, a 6-week branch that fights you on every rebase.
Derek Peters: And if you've ran into merge conflicts, that can be aggravating.
Derek Peters: Then, you roll out gradually. Internal users first, then a small percentage.
Derek Peters: And if you're working, let's say, on a solo product, grab some folks that can give you some feedback on that, and just do some user testing as well.
Derek Peters: But internal users first, Then a small percentage, watching the…
Derek Peters: Keep an eye on it the whole way.
Derek Peters: Then, you roll it out to everyone.
Derek Peters: If, let's say, the extractor returns something weird.
Derek Peters: You flip a, you know, let's… yeah, return something weird, you flip a switch, You don't need…
Derek Peters: you don't need to do, like, an emergency 2 a.m. deployment.
Derek Peters: the prompts… And the prompts on the sl… got tongue twisted there. And the prompts on the slide?
Derek Peters: And it… you'll see it right there, like, wrap the extractor in a flag cadence, extract V1 to fall off with fallback to manual entry, roll out to internal 5%, 100% gated error rate less than 1%.
Derek Peters: So… When you're shipping features, It's always good to ship small.
Derek Peters: Shift often, and… Have a way to kind of easily cut them on and off for slow rollouts.
Derek Peters: So here's a habit.
Derek Peters: That most people miss completely.
Derek Peters: They use AI to write code.
Derek Peters: And then go back to reviewing all of it by hand.
Derek Peters: That's complete… that's completely backwards, because I don't know if you've been in that situation, that's a lot of work.
Derek Peters: Generate test alongside the feature.
Derek Peters: not as an afterthought. If you have a feature, That you're planning to implement?
Derek Peters: Work on that feature.
Derek Peters: Test it.
Derek Peters: If it's for users that, you know, if it's for real users that are going to use it, get some user feedback.
Derek Peters: And then roll it out.
Derek Peters: And test in increments.
Derek Peters: So, the pop line on the slide runs the test. So, type checks, and it has an AI reviewer to read off the
Derek Peters: Read off for what humans tend to skim past.
Derek Peters: Leap Secrets, missing test.
Derek Peters: broken conventions, and that's another thing that I want to call out, too. Like, the number…
Derek Peters: I'm not saying, like, review it line by line, but if you're working on those small features, you want to…
Derek Peters: Yeah, it's impossible to read, you know, read it line by line, but what I'm saying is.
Derek Peters: Don't wait till you have… 6 features.
Derek Peters: And thousands of lines of code in different files
Derek Peters: to, to roll something out. Roll those features out in increments.
Derek Peters: So… And make sure that it's testing, you know, generate tests with
Derek Peters: With the feature, the happy path, empty dunk.
Derek Peters: and off-schema response that fail, or that must fail safe, not crash, make the required CIG on every PR, and have it run through and just test your code. Have it read through your code, and do the testing.
Derek Peters: So, shipping isn't the finish line. It's where you finally get real information.
Derek Peters: So, instrument the feature before you announce it.
Derek Peters: A dark lunch teaches nothing.
Derek Peters: So… Back to our product, so if we take a look at Cadence first week, on the slide.
Derek Peters: 61% of people pasted a brain dump.
Derek Peters: Beating target, an average of, let's say, we got 61% pace of… Brain dump.
Derek Peters: Target was 50%. Organized, so 6.4 tasks extracted per session.
Derek Peters: 34% tweak a priority, and then next, you know, why is this priority? And then there's an explainer in there.
Derek Peters: That's… yeah, that does harden the build. Each component should be a sub-dependent on itself, absolutely.
Derek Peters: Do you think?
Derek Peters: So let's bring this… To kind of full circle.
Derek Peters: So, what we went over was writing a vision, a requirement document, and a roadmap before you even get into coding. Those are…
Derek Peters: The three most important documents… to me.
Derek Peters: That can be created and generated before you get into developing a product.
Derek Peters: And… and those are, like, those are the spec the AI builds from. So… and then we talked about prompting.
Derek Peters: We talked about, you know.
Derek Peters: We drove the build straight out of the requirements document, planned first, we tightened the loops.
Derek Peters: We had it go through each line.
Derek Peters: We talked about, you know, testing, And…
Derek Peters: as long as you keep those in mind as you're progressing to build, that's what separates you from, let's say, somebody that's just 5 coding, creating things, which is… is still great, but…
Derek Peters: Is there proof in the real world? Probably not.
Derek Peters: the better you can plan the what and the why and the who.
Derek Peters: The better your product's gonna turn out.
Derek Peters: And the quality of what you ship is decided long before and long after the model types a single character, a single line of code.
Derek Peters: So, before we open it up, Two quick things.
Derek Peters: What are some things, you know, if you're working on some things, and…
Derek Peters: you've been toying around? It sounds like we have a lot of experienced individuals on the call, too. Like, it'd be interesting, like, what are you working on? That… that would be fun.
Derek Peters: Okay.
Derek Peters: I love the interaction.
Derek Peters: You all are awesome.
Derek Peters: Okay.
Derek Peters: So, before I make, before we go on to the next slide, here's…
Derek Peters: what I actually want you to do.
Derek Peters: Because… because of talk, you don't…
Derek Peters: Let's see, because you don't act on entertainment, you know, 3 moves, 3 things that you can do.
Derek Peters: to kind of help you is write a one-page PVD on the next project or next idea that you have.
Derek Peters: Turn it into a requirements document, scope it out.
Derek Peters: Write out, you know, what's in scope, what's out of scope.
Derek Peters: you know, that keeps it shippable, it keeps it simple, it also makes it easy to develop a roadmap that you can actually deploy, and then make an AI plan first. Like, work with the LLM to make a plan and a roadmap for you. So, before you write a single line of code, have it propose a plan, and then you just approve it.
Derek Peters: No new tools, it sounds like it's everything that everybody's using.
Derek Peters: But, but that's it.
Derek Peters: And before we get into any Q&A that's on there,
Derek Peters: We… we do have our applications open. If there's anybody that's interested in joining us here at Gauntlet, would love to invite you to apply.
Derek Peters: And, I also want to say thank you so much for your time.
Derek Peters: as well.
Derek Peters: And, we'll also be sharing that information with you as well. Oh, thank you, Sunny. There it is.
Derek Peters: So that's it.
Derek Peters: We kind of went through one product example from this ideation to…
Derek Peters: To shipping the, you know, shipping the features?
Derek Peters: And kept it into an AI-first planning methodology, so AI-first product planning.
Derek Peters: So, same loop, real documents, real prompts, and every prompt and every result that you saw here was actually from my iteration going through my planning process.
Derek Peters: And I will tell you that it does… Make a huge difference.
Derek Peters: The more planning you can do up front.
Derek Peters: Gives you a richer product that… Users will actually use.
Derek Peters: So, the floor is wide open. We got, we got a few minutes. If anybody does have any questions.
Derek Peters: Be more than happy to answer that for you.
Derek Peters: So, Mark, you asked, you know, where does the UI design fit into this? It fits in… it fits into the very beginning of, because, like, whenever you're planning, like, your… let's say your product vision.
Derek Peters: and your product requirements, like the PRD, you could either do it one of two ways. You could have, like, a requirement document for, like, your UI, UX piece of it, and have it, like, two separate documents. I do like to fold it up into the same PRD, that way I'm not having to point, to two documents.
Derek Peters: or two different versions of the documents, because it can sometimes confuse the LLM, but you can fold that into your requirements document. That's a good question.
Derek Peters: So, UI design actually follows the same set. You have a vision, you have your requirements.
Derek Peters: You know, the what, The why, the who.
Derek Peters: And… It's just… it becomes part of your requirements.
Derek Peters: So, Josh, you said, is there a benefit to writing out code by hand anymore when AI can just write it for me?
Derek Peters: I do think there is a huge benefit in having that background and knowledge, because
Derek Peters: even though, like, let's say you have AI write it, you got the advantage of knowing, like, if you have an issue or, like, a bug or something, knowing how to read and write code is still an important skill today.
Derek Peters: Because that way, you don't have to have it completely wipe something. If you…
Derek Peters: you know, hey, I got this bug, find it, and then you realize that it's, like.
Derek Peters: it rewrote 3 different files, but if, you know, still knowing how to write code, or at least jump-starting, you can even jumpstart writing your… getting your setup and start coding yourself, and then have the AI kind of be, like, a coding assistant to help you out. You don't have to have it do it
Derek Peters: for you, it does kind of defeat the personal, like, you know, AI-first development.
Derek Peters: But… Knowing how to write code yourself can also help save time in debugging.
Derek Peters: Renee, what shipping flag tools are you using? So…
Derek Peters: I put that into… kind of build it into my roadmap. I like to use Claude Code to… so I have it tied into a roadmap, and then I have each feature kind of incremented and cut out, but I like to keep those into my docs folder, into a README file, and then,
Derek Peters: point the LLM to it, and then that way we know exactly what, shipping
Derek Peters: shipping flag, or what feature gets shipped, and which ones to flag. So I use Claude Code for that.
Derek Peters: And I may have missed Abby's question, so Carl, thanks for bringing it up right there. So, as a PM, I find one of the biggest challenges is slicing AI features into user stories.
Derek Peters: That are both technically feasible and valuable enough to gain support.
Derek Peters: In a larger enterprise where AI adoption tends to be slower.
Derek Peters: close the… let's see, I'm just… I'm reading through this question here. So, how do we close the gap between PM's Quick Planning and Development and Classic Engineering? I'd be interested in what tools you have today
Derek Peters: On that.
Derek Peters: And there's so many… or, like, what AI features…
Derek Peters: It doesn't have to be, like, what you're planning.
Derek Peters: I have not tested Fable against Opus yet.
Derek Peters: I just got into it right before this call.
Derek Peters: I, I can't… bring myself to use Fable just yet. I'm sure it's fantastic.
Derek Peters: but… burning through those tokens when Opus is
Derek Peters: In most cases, Sonnet's good for what I need to use it for. Opus, I use for, like, more complex tasks.
Derek Peters: But for day-to-day, Sonnet's pretty good. I haven't even opened the door of Fable.
Derek Peters: Well, there's the answer. Josh ran out in an hour, so…
Derek Peters: Now, one thing I do like about Opus, though, is, like, whenever you don't… like, you have a vision and you want it to interview, I have found that it does do a really good job in interviewing you with some half-baked information and helping you flesh out some ideas into a true vision. It does a really good job with that.
Derek Peters: Oh, AI tools to develop features, okay.
Derek Peters: Yes, that is rough in an enterprise environment, because there's a lot of security protocols,
Derek Peters: in place, and I've ran into that before, as well.
Derek Peters: and I think from there, it's just more about…
Derek Peters: selling the benefit of what those tools or features can do, but if you're going to do that, like, let's say Carl and, I think it was Abby, there's a lot of great chats here, but…
Derek Peters: I would come up with, like, a use case, and…
Derek Peters: And some proof, like, what you can actually do with it, and how… and…
Derek Peters: really sell the value of the return on investment that those AI features are going to help you as, let's say, a PM, and work with the team of developers. So an ROI, especially in an enterprise environment, is going to be super important, but the most important piece is the security piece, like.
Derek Peters: what guardrails are you going to put around it to make sure that that enterprise information stays safe? Because that's what those corporations care about.
Derek Peters: So, like, if you just come up with a good story and a good use case and show, like, what the return on investment is for the organization.
Derek Peters: I've had a lot of good luck, getting ears to listen, I should say.
Derek Peters: Does that help, Carl?
Derek Peters: He turns into a house of cards.
Derek Peters: All right.
Derek Peters: Well, it does look like we're 2 minutes after. A lot of great conversation, a lot of great interactions, loved every minute of it.
Derek Peters: Just wanted to say thank you all for allowing me to host you this evening for Gauntlets Night School, and really appreciate you coming. I hope you guys have a wonderful night, morning, and evening, depending on where you're at in the world. It's been great. Thank you all.
Tom Babb: You can just log out, Derek, or you can just end the call.
Derek Peters: Okay. Oh, no, I can't end it. It just lets me to leave, so you and Sonny were gonna…
Tom Babb: Yeah, you got it, you got it. We're good, thank you.