I've been daydreaming about redesigning the Strategy Breakdowns website for at least a year.

Picture this:

→ An infinite canvas. Every article as a card in a grid.

→ A new interactive way for readers to explore the archive.

But it’s always sat in the embarrassingly long “maybe one day” pile.

Recently I came across a tool that let me prototype it in an evening.

It only took about 2 minutes of “aha” moments and “oh damn that’s cool” design decisions for me to realise I had to turn my rainy-night-in into a breakdown.

Enjoy.

— Tom

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The what: A TLDR explanation of the strategy

The Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025:

→ “Vibe-coding”

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy back in Feb.

A year later, 368,000 people are searching it every month.

It’s spawned 100s of tools promising to turn prompts into products. We’ve all tried it by now.

Vibe-coding spans the continuum of 6-year olds one-shotting 3D adventure RPGs to cracked 100x engineers Claude Coding solutions to previously-impossible-to-untangle, multi-billion-dollar problems at public companies.

Somewhere along that line is possibly one of the most productive use cases to crack: PMs, designers, and other dev-adjacent roles at real companies wanting to bring their product ideas to life.

The fundamental problem with all the leading vibe-coding tools: the output looks nothing like your actual product.

Most of the time, you’re not starting from scratch. You have an existing product, a design system, a UI with years of thoughtful pixel-by-pixel iteration.

The last thing you want is to walk into a stakeholder meeting and spend the first five minutes apologising for the colours / spacing / font etc.

Alloy solves this.

Rather than starting from a blank canvas, it captures your existing product and lets you vibe on top of it.

Their positioning is deliberately narrow. While Lovable, Bolt, Replit etc fight over hobbyists and side projects, Alloy carved out its own niche: professional product teams prototyping on existing apps.

The team behind Alloy is ex-Atlassian PM Simon Kubica and ex-Canva engineer Christian Iacullo. Watching Australians get into Y Combinator is a bit like watching Thorpey at the Olympics.

Since launching in late 2025: 10,000+ signups, over 1 million impressions, and leaders at 42% of the Forbes Cloud 100 already signed up.

I spent a year at Atlassian and use Canva daily, so I'm definitely biased. But these crazy numbers aren't.

I saw their viral launch and instantly decided to test it myself to vibe my strategybreakdowns.com revamp. Here’s how it went (final link at the end!)

The how: The strategic playbook boiled down to 3x key takeaways

Most AI tools ask you to describe what you want. Alloy starts by scanning what you already have.

The onboarding took roughly 90 seconds.

Install the extension.

Navigate to my website.

Click “capture”

And then, there it was. My entire homepage, not as a screenshot, but as an editable prototype with every element selectable, every component identified.

So I started typing… and Alloy started vibing.

A few minutes later, v1.01

A few back-and-forths later, v1.05

The familiar Strategy Breakdowns personality remained. The fonts. The spacing. The colours.

Tbh it’s exactly what I'd been imagining for months.

What struck me wasn't the speed - the other tools are fast too. It was the fidelity. This looked like something I could actually ship.

Enterprise software usually requires procurement approval, IT review, and a 3-month implementation.

Alloy just requires a browser extension.

Yes, some companies mandate approval for extensions, but many don’t.

And plus - there’s no integration effort. No codebase access. No purchase order. Anyone at a company can install it, for free, and capturing their product or website immediately.

One PM at Salesforce installs it to prototype a feature. They share the interactive prototype via link.

Their colleague opens it.

No account required.

Interact directly with the prototype.

Leave comments.

Just like sharing a Loom or a Notion page.

Experience the product’s value first-hand.

The colleague thinks, "I need this for my project."

They capture their own page. Share their own prototype. Tag a designer in the comments for feedback.

Designer drops the link in a #today-im-working-on Slack channel.

Design lead sees it and asks "How did they make this look so real?”

By Friday, half the org has the extension installed.

One person’s capture seeds the workspace for others to build on.

Team members can even branch the prototype with their own ideas, capture additional pages / screens to widen the prototype, or simply use Alloy for a different project now they are aware the tool exists.

Localised flywheels inside companies.

Alloy isn't trying to replace your workflow. It's trying to become the connective tissue between the tools and JTBDs teams already have.

They launched with 30+ integrations out of the box.

A feature request in Jira or Linear can pipe directly into Alloy to become a prototype.

User feedback captured in Dovetail can spawn a new exploration.

→ Work flowing into Alloy from established tools.

Then, the person building the prototype can export directly as code into GitHub to jump-start feature development once its approved.

Or export into Figma so designers can finish polishing if needed.

→ Work flowing from Alloy into established tools.

Alloy isn’t meant to replace engineers or designers, but to accelerate hand-offs and ensure everyone is aligned to the same high-fidelity vision.

It becomes the central "product canvas" where insights, tickets, and feedback converge into tangible product changes.

Collapsing the gap between "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "here's what it would look like"

Atlassian + Canva DNA = Professional workflows + Design magic

The where: 3x high-signal resources to learn more

Here’s the end result after a few hours of vibing.

Click around. Tell me if I should actually build it.

Any other ideas (I’m thinking filters, hover interactions, animations) - let me know!

How I first came across Alloy.

This drove 10k+ signups and over 1 million impressions.

Straight into the ‘perfectly executed launch post + hype reel’ swipe file.

This was my favourite (and really the only) business breakdown I could find (so far) on what makes Alloy exciting.

Worth a read.

Anything Jason Lemkin writes puts a smile on my face.

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