When founders prototype with AI, product counsel must prototype with law
OpenAI's GPT-5 made "vibe coding" the new normal. When business leaders go from concept to working prototype in minutes, legal guidance needs to happen at prototype speed, not policy-document speed.
OpenAI's GPT-5 just made "vibe coding" the new normal—founders sitting with engineers, tweaking software prototypes in real-time through conversation with AI. Project managers have stopped writing detailed requirement docs and started generating working demos instead. This isn't just faster. It's a fundamentally different relationship between ideas and implementation.
Product counsel who understand this shift will become essential partners. When business leaders can go from concept to working prototype in minutes, legal guidance needs to happen at prototype speed, not policy-document speed. The old model of comprehensive legal review after development is complete becomes a bottleneck that kills momentum and stalls innovation.
BBVA is already using GPT-5 to analyze complex financial documents that previous models couldn't handle. Biotech pioneer Amgen reports notable accuracy improvements. At $1.25 per million input tokens, this capability is now economically accessible to organizations across industries. Product counsel need to ask ourselves: will our companies adopt these workflows with us integrated into them, or will we get marginalized?
We need to rethink how we deliver legal guidance. Instead of static policies, we need conversational legal intelligence that can engage with product teams through the same interfaces they're using to build. Learn to prototype legal frameworks the way engineers prototype features—iteratively, collaboratively, and fast.
