Last night I attended a panel called "Lean Development in the Vibecode Era for Healthtech," hosted by Xmartlabs and Pepper NYC.
A few things that stuck with me:
"AI" is doing a lot of work as a catch-all term. On the admin side: documentation, referrals, parsing orders into insights — the tooling is genuinely ready. On the clinical decision-making side? Not quite there yet. Knowing which bucket you're actually solving for matters.
10x output doesn't mean 10x less human review. If anything, the bottleneck just moves — to PR review, to testing, to human approval. Smaller PRs aren't just an engineering best practice anymore; they're required. And product/design need to adopt that same instinct.
Build vs. buy vs. partner isn't a three-way fork anymore, it's a remix. Take one component, build another, partner on a third. The real question isn't "can we build this," it's "do we want to own the maintenance, the support, the staying-current burden." Feasibility is rarely the constraint. Ownership is.
What's actually proprietary anymore? Code is cheaper to produce than ever; if you built it in a weekend, someone else can too. What's harder to replicate: your data (especially care coordination data), and a community that trusts you. Trust comes down to who's building it and whether they actually care about the outcome.
The gap between prototype and production is still wildly underestimated. Getting something working is the easy part now. Getting customers, getting architecture right, planning ahead — that's where the real work lives.
And maybe my favorite takeaway: coding is becoming a commodity skill. What's valuable now are strong communicators — technical and non-technical — systems thinkers, architects, and people who can hold the whole picture.
My take? As a product leader with a technical background who's spent years in the build-fast-but-build-right trenches, this is exactly the kind of moment I've been training for. If you're a health tech company trying to figure out your own build/buy/partner calculus, let's talk. ARK Foundry is built for exactly this.
Shout out to the panelists: Amanda Manget (Product @ Bevel), Thivaher (Thiv) Paramsothy (Founder @ Hera Fertility), and Federico Balarini (Head of Engineering @ Xmartlabs), moderated by Brittany Sigler, DrPH (fractional product lead).