A good MVP PRD is short, specific and testable. It tells whoever builds your product, a developer or an AI, exactly what v1 does, what it doesn't, and how you'll know it works. Here's the 8-section structure, with a filled-in example.
Before you apply to ventureLAB's Hardware Catalyst Initiative, you need three things in writing: a product plan, an IP strategy, and a customer-engagement model. Together, those three documents make up a product spec. Founders who write the spec first can build the application in a day. Founders who skip it can spend a month on it.
Codalio Blueprint is a free, MIT-licensed plugin that adds 10 planning and review skills to popular coding agents. The flagship skill, prd-builder, runs three lenses (Product & Scope, Architecture & Data, GTM) and synthesizes a single PRD that resolves contradictions before anyone writes code. Later skills review what gets built — auth exposure, performance cost, silent regressions, and which tests are worth writing. Outputs land as files in your repo — not ephemeral chat — so builders read a durable source of truth.
A software RFP just landed in your inbox, and the clock is already running. Dozens of pages of requirements to decode, a price and timeline to commit to, and compliance clauses buried in the fine print — with days, not weeks, to respond. Guess low and you lose money; guess high and you lose the bid.
Most people go looking for an AI RFP writer to speed this up. Codalio takes a different approach: instead of generating prose, you upload the RFP and it builds the substance behind your response.
The software industry spent eighteen months solving the wrong half of the problem.
AI made code generation nearly free. Copilot, Cursor, and a wave of prompt-to-app tools let anyone turn a sentence into a running application in minutes. We called it "vibe coding," and it was genuinely exciting. But it solved the generation problem while quietly introducing a far more dangerous one: generating the wrong thing, confidently, at scale.
The fix isn't better code generation. It's the layer that comes before the code — the product specification. This is the shift from vibe coding to agentic engineering, and it's the difference between a demo that wows on Tuesday and a product that survives Wednesday.
The demo dazzles for ninety seconds. Then the investor asks, "How does this scale?" — and the room goes quiet.
A demo proves something runs. It says nothing about whether you know what you're building. A PRD does, and that's the document that actually moves money.
The conversation in AI building has quietly flipped. A year ago, the question was "which model?" Now it's "which harness?" — the orchestration layer that takes one instruction and fans it out across dozens or hundreds of parallel agents, each chipping at a slice of the work.
The proof point everyone repeats is real and genuinely impressive: a 750,000-line codebase ported from one language to another at 99.8% test pass, in eleven days. The takeaway people drew from it was "the harness is the moat." The same model scores differently depending on the wrapper around it, so the wrapper is where the leverage lives.
Half right. The harness is leverage. But leverage multiplies whatever you point it at — and most founders are pointing it at a guess.
A founder showed me a Lovable build last week. Working login, a dashboard with three charts, a settings page that actually saved. Built in an afternoon. They asked if this counted as "agentic engineering" — the phrase their advisor kept using.
It didn't. And not because the tool was wrong, or the output was bad. The demo was genuinely impressive. The problem was that nothing the agent produced had been asked for in a way it could defend. The login worked because someone clicked through a happy path. The dashboard rendered because the mock data fit. The settings page saved because nobody tried to save anything weird.
The second a real user shows up with a real edge case, the whole thing folds. Not because the agent is bad at code — but because the agent was improvising the whole time. There was no spec. There was a vibe.
Many teams think the hard part is writing the PRD.
In practice, the next handoff is where the real trouble starts.
The PRD explains what the product should do. The technical scope explains how the team is going to deliver it.
Most founders do not start with a PRD. They start with a rough product idea, a few notes, and a list of features that keeps changing.
That is normal. The problem starts when the team tries to build from that raw input.
An AI PRD generator is useful only if it helps you create a document that engineering, design, and stakeholders can actually use.