This Is Not Vibe Coding, This Is Industrial AI With Noel Jackson

[Dev]olution

Everyone loves a “vibe coded this in a weekend” story. Almost nobody shows you the infrastructure that keeps it from falling over the second you charge a credit card.

In this episode, host Nicky Pike sits down with Noel Jackson, founder of Sonica, a zero-platform-fee music platform built by one person using AI agents and Coder workspaces.

Noel spent 25 years building products, from early days at WordPress.com to running eight Kubernetes clusters as a CTO. Then he walked away to ship the tool he wanted as a musician: fast uploads, private encrypted storage, timestamped comments on the go, sharing that feels like Google Docs, and a one-click path from first demo to first sale.

Instead of chasing “vibe coding,” Noel orchestrates multiple AI agents as if they were a remote team. He writes specs in GitHub, tags an issue, Coder spins up an isolated workspace, and AI does most of the work while he sleeps—payments, audio processing, mobile apps, Kubernetes, observability, the whole stack.

If you’ve ever thought, “I could ship this if I had a real team,” this episode will mess with your excuses and show you what industrial-strength AI development can actually look like.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. How Noel writes specs that let AI agents safely handle 75–95% of a feature
2. Why ephemeral, resettable workspaces change how far you can trust autonomous agents
3. How a voice-first workflow with SuperWhisper leads to better prompts and cleaner code

Things to listen for:

(00:00) Meet Noel Jackson

(00:18) Why vibe coding clips miss the real story

(02:01) Walking away from a CTO role to build Sonica

(03:56) What felt broken about existing music platforms

(05:06) Turning a “selfish” idea into a real product

(06:25) Why Sonica focuses on artists, not VC metrics

(07:37) Early beta users, sales, and real-world validation

(09:46) Zero platform fees, donations, and paid services

(11:31) From failed pandemic MVP to AI-powered rebuild

(13:22) When Claude finally became useful for serious dev work

(14:39) Handling payments and auth without becoming a vibe coding horror story

(17:02) Quitting the keyboard and coding by voice with SuperWhisper

(19:58) Getting 75–95% completion from agents in Coder workspaces

(22:23) Specs, Playwright, and treating AI like a real teammate

(27:40) Inside Noel’s mono-repo, infra stack, and GitHub Actions

(49:25) Live Sonica demo and what “being a coder” means now

Resources:

Noel Jackson’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noeljackson

Sonica website: https://sonica.music/