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title: 500 people vibe-coded for 30 days. I was one of them. -...
description: A product designer at Automattic shares her experience participating in a company-wide 'Radical Speed Month' where ~500 employees formed two-person teams to...
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# 500 people vibe-coded for 30 days. I was one of them. - Sanja Grbic, Automattic

**[AI Engineer](https://daily.dev/sources/aidotengineer)** · 17 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A product designer at Automattic shares her experience participating in a company-wide 'Radical Speed Month' where ~500 employees formed two-person teams to build and ship projects in 30 days. Using AI coding tools (primarily Claude Code), she built three projects: a board game session manager, a design system status tracker, and an iOS chat app for WooCommerce merchants. The experiment transformed her from a designer into a design engineer, and she reflects on how AI enables non-engineers to contribute code, how engineers must evolve into enablers and teachers, and how large organizations can foster this shift by providing tool access, experimentation space, and agency.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcYoMg-8-L8>

## Questions this post answers

### What was Automattic's Radical Speed Month experiment?

It was a 30-day company-wide initiative where employees paused their regular roadmap work, paired up in two-person teams, and shipped real projects with full autonomy. Around 500 people, roughly a third of the company, participated in the first round, starting about 794 projects, with AI coding tools like Claude Code encouraged but not required.

_Teams weighing similar AI-driven experiments can follow real outcomes and lessons on daily.dev._

### Can a non-engineer designer actually ship production code using AI coding tools?

Yes, a product designer with no prior professional coding experience built and deployed a working design system status tracker to production over two and a half weeks using Claude Code, pulling live data from GitHub, Storybook, and Figma. She credited strong internal documentation, security processes, and pairing with engineers early on for making this possible within a large, established company.

_Designers exploring hands-on AI coding can compare real transitions from design to code on daily.dev._

### How fast can a small team build a working AI-powered chat feature using AI coding tools?

Two designers went from zero to a fully working proof of concept in six days, building an iOS chat feature for WooCommerce merchants with wordpress.com authentication, a Jetpack connection, a themed widget, and an AI agent that answers shopper questions in real time. The process started as a Claude Code project folder that recorded chats and ideas, which sped up later collaboration.

_Teams estimating realistic AI-assisted build timelines can track similar case studies on daily.dev._

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- [83% of developers are vibe coding, but call for more governance and coordination to manage workloads, new research reveals](https://daily.dev/posts/83-of-developers-are-vibe-coding-but-call-for-more-governance-and-coordination-to-manage-workloads-8rkpqecv1) · SD Times · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
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---

Tags: [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#vibe-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/vibe-coding), [#design-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/design-systems)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/500-people-vibe-coded-for-30-days-i-was-one-of-them---sanja-grbic-automattic-hqotsq2cj)

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