If you only check one highlight this week: my lead story about vibecoding.

Enjoy the weekend and all the new Super Bowl commercials.

-François

I've been vibe coding for a while. Given the clients I serve, I have to.

It's also really fun.

I first built a CMO Assessment App for my clients (12 questions + a rubric to assess you/your CMO) and then the first version of my personal website.

I liked it initially.

I thought it was elegant. I liked the gradients, fonts, dark mode, and subtle hover effects.

Until I realized it obviously looked just like YET. ANOTHER. VIBE-CODED. SITE. 😠

I couldn't stand it anymore. Especially as a CMO who is always asking “how will you differentiate?”.

So, I went back to my friend Claude Code, determined to up my game:

Here's what it looks like so far: still a work in progress, but the home page is close to done, as is the “Why?” page (I still need to work on copy)

I also built my admin console. It helps me import my previous articles and content from LinkedIn and Decibel using a scraper and the Claude API. There, I can edit my content, pick the color and texture for the new “books”, reorganize them, etc.

So yes, we can push these AIs and build something different. It's possible. Also quite scary for web agencies and designers to see that.

It takes a little time, some judgement, some inspiration, some taste, and iteration. But that's always true if you want to build something that's worth doing.

The $100/month I pay for my Claude Max plan is insane value because I do much more than just create a website with it.

Claude couldn't do that a couple of months ago. Why is this possible now?

I kept watching Claude work, understanding what it got wrong, backtracking, fixing, and iterating. Incredible.

Once done, I even asked it to create a page that recaps my entire style guide and a Markdown file that documents it all, which I've attached to the Claude Projects where I want to create assets in my brand.

The implications?

Wondering how my site is built and what it's built on? I asked Claude to summarize (I did not know about GSAP + Scroll Trigger, Lenis, or Alpine.js before embarking on that project - Claude recommended that. I am surprised it did not pick a framework like NextJS or React):

In short: A lightweight, fast static site with smooth animations, hosted on Vercel, with a few serverless APIs for dynamic features like the newsletter.

Setting up Claude Code was super easy. Refer to a recent edition for some guidance.

Your turn! I hope you have fun and build something that stands out.

Researchers from Peking University and Google Cloud AI Research announced PaperBanana, a new agentic AI framework designed to automate the creation of publication-quality academic illustrations.

The description of how it works with a 5-agent pipeline is very representative of how agents work together.

You're going to hear about such orchestration more and more: each agent is specialized and represents a given persona. A supervisor agent - the planner below - orchestrates things.

“How It Works: The 5-Agent Pipeline

PaperBanana doesn't just "guess" an image; it uses a multi-stage collaborative team of AI agents (powered by models like Gemini-3-Pro) to ensure scientific accuracy and aesthetic rigor:

Very smart and well-executed series of ads by Anthropic for Claude.

Claude will not eclipse Bad Bunny, given the political climate. And that's a good thing.

Ads are smart, very creative, well executed (“Absolutely!”) and will garner attention and make Claude enter the collective mindshare by picking on ChatGPT (that has insane brand recognition and people start liking to dislike).

But they are addressing a pain point that doesn't exist today, YET. Have any ads truly polluted your interactions with AI so far?

I'm nitpicking, but since Claude is starting to dominate the world of work, I would probably have focused more on that: Claude is great for work (as in the version below) rather than showing personal use cases.

Leave that to OpenAI.

Win “work AI”.

Nicole is going to strike a chord with her post (below, too), because so many will see it as a great stress and FOMO reliever. Indeed, keeping up with AI advancements puts a lot of pressure on all of us. It's exhausting if you're trying to try every new tool that seems relevant for you (my backlog just got longer in the last four days only), when so many get overhyped by influencers.

I do agree that you do not need to try all the tools (e.g. OpenClaw), especially if they are designed for folks more technical than you.

I, however, disagree that you don't have to learn to vibecode (we're really talking about typing English into a chat box…), to push yourself to use AI better, to understand what agent orchestration is (see above). You should have created custom GPTs, or gems, or projects. Or saved or created some skills if you use Claude.

This week alone, I have worked with two co-founders who are advanced with AI, and I've never moved this fast with clients. I started feeling bad for the teams that don't know how to use these tools of drastic acceleration. Or worse, they still don't have access to them because of IT, security, or budget.

When I hear some marketers still hope that AI is all hype and will not change much re. how we work, I feel bad for them after having observed some of my colleagues, clients, and inspirations, and what they are able to do, leaving others in the dust.

This genie is NOT getting back in its bottle.

Thanks for sharing these highlights with busy marketing execs around you.🙏

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François | LinkedIn

I'm a CMO, advisor, and "CMO Wingman". Yes, that's a thing :-). Ask my clients: in this AI era, CMOs need a strategic proactive advisor more than ever. I’m former CMO at Twilio, Augment Code, Apollo GraphQL, Decibel, Udacity and Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.