In January 2025, Andrej Karpathy — former Tesla AI director, ex-OpenAI founding member — posted a thread about a new way he’d been writing software.
He called it “vibe coding.” You describe what you want in natural language. The AI builds it. You barely look at the code. You just feel the vibes.
He was half-joking. The internet took it completely seriously.
Pieter Levels didn’t need to name it — he was already living it.
Levels bootstrapped seven products to profitability: RemoteOK, NomadList, PhotoAI, InteriorAI, and others. Combined ARR: over $4 million. Employees: zero. Computer science degree: none.
His process is essentially: find a problem people have, open Cursor, describe the product to Claude, ship it in a weekend, iterate based on user feedback. He runs the whole thing from a laptop in a coffee shop.
The traditional gatekeepers — CS degrees, big teams, VC backing — aren’t gone. But they’re no longer required.
What’s actually happening here?
The old model of software development had a very high floor. To ship anything meaningful, you needed to understand data structures, networking, databases, deployment, security. It took years to acquire this fluency.
AI has lowered the floor dramatically without lowering the ceiling. You can now describe a working SaaS product in plain English and get something running in an afternoon. The ceiling — what you can build if you really know what you’re doing — is higher than ever.
The skill that’s becoming valuable isn’t “can you write a for-loop” — it’s taste, judgment, and domain knowledge.
A nurse can now build a patient intake system. A lawyer can build a contract analysis tool. A teacher can build a personalized tutoring app. The people who understand the problem best are no longer blocked from building the solution.
This is what happens when you lower the cost of making things: more things get made. Most of them bad. Some of them extraordinary. A few change industries.
Software is becoming a medium — like writing or photography. The barrier to entry just dropped. The people who used to only have ideas can now also ship them.
That changes everything about who the next generation of companies gets built by.