# Vibe-Coding Throwaway Tools: A TPM's New Habit

*By [Gianfranco Mileo](https://gianfranco-mileo.com/) · Published September 7, 2026 · 6 min read · Category: Tools & Resources · Tags: TPM, Workflows, Developer Tools, Automation, Release Planning · Canonical: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/blog/vibe-coding-throwaway-tools-a-tpms-new-habit*

> Frontier models now build a working tool in one prompt. Here's how I turn that into faster release planning, risk tracking, and cleaner stakeholder syncs.

**TL;DR** Frontier models now build a working, single-purpose tool from one prompt — and cheap coding agents make throwaway utilities almost free. For TPMs, the win isn't shipping software; it's compressing the grunt work in release planning, risk tracking, and retros. Below are concrete workflows and a prompt you can run today.

## The shift that actually matters this week

Two small things caught my eye this week, and they're more important than any benchmark table. Simon Willison recorded a phone video and had a coding agent build him a [browser-based video compressor using the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/7/video-compressor/) — no server, no repo, just a working tool. The next day he had another model build an [animated transition between two map projections in D3](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/7/equal-earth/) out of pure curiosity.

Neither of those is a product. That's the point. They're throwaway tools built in the time it takes to write a Slack message. Meanwhile Latent Space spent 20B+ tokens putting GPT-6 Astra through its paces and framed it as [an automated AI engineer you can hire for under $6 an hour](https://www.latent.space/p/astra). And OpenAI's own writeup on [how coding agents are reshaping research inside the company](https://openai.com/index/research-acceleration-view-inside-openai) shows the same pattern: the cost of writing small, disposable code just collapsed.

I've spent 20+ years in tech and 5+ at Google as a TPM, and I can tell you the biggest tax on this job has never been thinking — it's the glue. Reformatting data. Reconciling two spreadsheets. Turning a status thread into a summary. That glue is exactly what a throwaway tool eats for breakfast.

## What a TPM should build (and never keep)

Let me be precise about scope. I'm not talking about you standing up a service the org depends on. I'm talking about single-use utilities that solve a problem you have this afternoon and get deleted tomorrow. The mental model is: if explaining the problem takes less time than doing it by hand, hand it to an agent.

### Release planning: reconcile the messy inputs

Release planning dies in the seams between tools. One team tracks work in a tracker, another in a doc, a third in a slide. I've owned end-to-end delivery for Camera & Media across Android, and the hardest part is rarely the plan — it's assembling a trustworthy picture from inconsistent sources. A throwaway parser that ingests two exports and flags features with no owner, no date, or conflicting states is a five-minute build now. You run it once, you read the diff, you delete it.

### Risk tracking: turn prose into structure

Risks live in freeform notes. The value is in structure: severity, owner, mitigation, trigger. I've had good results asking a model to extract that structure from raw meeting notes, then sort by unmitigated severity. A small tool that does this on a folder of notes beats a manual pass every time. I wrote more about the class of tools that actually help in [the tools that actually move the needle on release planning](https://gianfranco-mileo.com/blog/the-tpms-ai-stack-what-actually-moves-the-needle-on-release-planning).

### Stakeholder sync: one narrative, three audiences

The same status update needs three shapes: a one-liner for leadership, a detailed cut for engineering, a risk-forward cut for partners. Instead of writing three times, I write the source of truth once and generate the variants. This is where prep work compounds — the same way [I use NotebookLM for technical reviews](https://gianfranco-mileo.com/blog/how-notebooklm-changed-my-approach-to-technical-reviews) to hold thousands of pages of context, a small generation step turns one narrative into audience-specific versions in seconds.

### Retros: find the pattern, not the anecdote

Retros drown in individual complaints. What you want is the pattern across the last three retros. Feed the raw notes to a model and ask for recurring themes ranked by frequency, with the specific quotes attached. Suddenly the retro is about systems, not personalities.

> **Try this today — the risk-extraction prompt.** Paste your raw meeting or standup notes after it:
>
> *"You are helping a technical program manager. From the notes below, extract every risk or blocker. Return a table with columns: Risk, Severity (High/Med/Low), Owner (or 'UNASSIGNED'), Mitigation (or 'NONE STATED'), Trigger date (or 'unknown'). Do not invent owners or dates — if it's not in the text, mark it unknown. After the table, list the top 3 risks that are High severity AND have no mitigation."*
>
> The magic is the constraint: forbidding invented owners and dates. That turns a plausible-sounding summary into something you can actually act on.

## The catch: cheap doesn't mean free

Two honest caveats. First, cheaper per task doesn't mean unlimited. The Astra coverage notes the new frontier class is *pricier per token* even as it's cheaper per finished task — so "just throw an agent at it" still has a bill attached. Budget your token spend the way you'd budget any resource.

Second, and more important, these throwaway tools are throwaway *because* you don't trust them yet. Never let a one-shot script make a decision. It reformats, extracts, and drafts. You verify. The Latent Space Astra writeup also flagged that the newest models are *less monitorable* — a good reminder that speed and oversight pull in opposite directions. The judgment about what a risk means, when to escalate, and whether a plan is credible stays with you.

I keep coming back to a simple rule: the tool handles the mechanical transformation; the TPM owns the interpretation. That line is where all the value — and all the safety — lives.

## Why this is a habit, not a project

The reason to internalize this now is that the friction just dropped below a threshold. When building a small utility took an afternoon, you did the work by hand. When it takes two minutes, the default flips. My bet is that within a year, "I'll just build a quick tool for that" becomes as normal for TPMs as writing a doc — and the people who practice it now will have a real edge.

I learned the agent-building fundamentals — multi-agent architectures, prompt engineering, tool use — through recent coursework, and the biggest takeaway wasn't the frameworks. It was that most of my day is composed of tiny, well-scoped transformations that a model does instantly. Naming those transformations is the actual skill.

## What I'm doing about this

I'm building a small personal library of throwaway prompts and scripts for the transformations I hit every week — the risk extractor above, a notes-to-status generator, a two-export reconciler. My intention is to treat each one as disposable: build it when I need it, verify the output by hand, and not pretend any of it is production tooling. I want to measure how much of the mechanical glue I can hand off without ceding a single judgment call. If the frontier keeps making tools this cheap to build, the differentiator won't be who has the fanciest model — it'll be who knows exactly which two minutes of grunt work to delete.

## Sources

- [Video compressor](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/7/video-compressor/) — Simon Willison
- [Mercator ↔ Equal Earth](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/7/equal-earth/) — Simon Willison
- [GPT-6 Astra: an automated AI Engineer you can hire for <$6 an hour](https://www.latent.space/p/astra) — Latent Space
- [Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/research-acceleration-view-inside-openai) — OpenAI News

---

Original article: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/blog/vibe-coding-throwaway-tools-a-tpms-new-habit  
More articles: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/blog · RSS: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/feed.xml · JSON Feed: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/feed.json · Site context for agents: https://gianfranco-mileo.com/llms.txt