Most internal tools are outdated before they ever ship. That's the problem at the heart of this conversation - and it's one that almost every technical founder has felt personally. Daniel Kazani sits down with Dario Di Carlo, CEO and co-founder of bricks.sh, to talk about why internal tooling is quietly draining engineering teams, and why the vibe-coding shortcut will make it worse before it makes it better.

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Dario built bricks.sh after living the problem firsthand: spending months building admin panels at a previous startup, only to ship something already outdated. The platform auto-generates admin panels directly from your database and keeps them in sync as your schema changes - so your engineers stop rebuilding the same tables, forms, and dashboards over and over again. Softup has seen this same pain up close with dozens of clients, which makes this one of the more honest and grounded conversations on the show.

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👤 Guest Bio

Dario Di Carlo is CEO and co-founder of bricks.sh, a Milan-based startup automating the creation and ongoing maintenance of internal admin panels. Before bricks.sh, he was a Product Manager at Nibol - Italy's leading workplace management platform - and spent several years exploring the intersection of AI and APIs. He holds an MSc in Innovation Management from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and co-founded bricks.sh with CTO Giuliano Torregrossa. The company raised a €1.6M pre-seed round in early 2026 and has signed up 500+ users across 40+ countries.

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📌 What We Cover

• Why internal tools are the most-built, least-appreciated part of any product org - and why that gap creates real friction between engineering and business teams
• The difference between dashboards (read-only data access) and operational admin panels (where you actually update users, flag transactions, process refunds) - and why bricks.sh aims to cover both
• Why vibe-coding your internal tools with Lovable or Claude Code creates a short-term win and a long-term maintenance tax
• The guardrails argument: why giving business users free customization without engineering guardrails turns into shadow IT and shadow AI - fast
• How bricks.sh chose startups and scale-ups over enterprise design partnerships early on, and why that bet was the right one for product-market clarity
• The bricks.sh product thesis: 90% of internal tools across finance, healthcare, logistics, and ed tech look identical - speed of development will beat freedom of customization
• What the future of internal tools looks like: conversational interfaces, MCP-powered data unification, and a single source of truth across Stripe, Intercom, Linear, and Postgres
• The founder side: zooming in vs. zooming out, defending a thesis under pressure, and why emotional stability - not enthusiasm - is the real asset at the early stage

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🔗 Resources Mentioned

• bricks.sh - the guest's product
• Retool - mentioned as a primary competitor and a tool Dario used extensively at his previous company
• Lovable - mentioned as a vibe-coding alternative with no guardrails
• Bolt - mentioned alongside Lovable as a low-code/no-code alternative
• Claude Code - mentioned as an AI-native coding tool in the vibe-coding conversation
• Supabase - bricks.sh's current lead database integration
• Stripe - mentioned as a data source for future admin panel unification
• Intercom - mentioned as a data source for future admin panel unification
• Linear - mentioned as a data source for future admin panel unification
• Softup - Daniel's company, referenced in the conversation as a concrete example of the internal tooling problem