Zapier's Agents of Scale (Wade Foster) — Eric on vibe coding, 'slop factories', and the new bottleneck after AI cheapens building

Wade Foster co-founded Zapier and is its chief executive; his podcast Agents of Scale interviews operators turning AI from experiment into infrastructure. Eric was the guest, revisiting which parts of The Lean Startup still hold now that coding agents have made writing code cheap.

“AI has made the build step radically faster. Code that used to take weeks can now appear in minutes. But Eric's warning is sharp: when building gets cheaper, measurement and learning become the new bottlenecks. Teams that use AI to close the learning loop are flying. Teams that use AI to outsource their judgment are building what he calls "slop factories."” — Zapier's Agents of Scale podcast — Wade Foster on the Eric Ries episode