Lenny's Written Position
AI coding tools have crossed a threshold where non-technical people can build real, useful products — not just demos.
The best way to learn AI coding tools is to start with a personal problem you actually want solved, not a tutorial project.
Vibe coding is most powerful for internal tools and personal productivity — not for building the next startup.
The gap between 'demo' and 'daily driver' is where most vibe-coded projects die — polish and reliability matter more than initial creation.
The code generated by AI prototyping tools is mostly useless to engineering teams because it does not follow existing patterns, use the same libraries, or even use the same programming language.
Replit can single-shot fairly sophisticated full-stack applications unlike other vibe-coding platforms, because it automatically tests the apps it builds using its internal browser and auto-fixes issues it finds.
Lovable reached $100 million ARR just eight months after launch, making it the fastest-growing company in history — faster than even Cursor.
Bolt grew from 0 to $40 million ARR in five months and is used by 72% of Fortune 500 product teams, differentiating itself by integrating frontier agents like Claude Code rather than relying on homegrown agents.
Using AI prototyping tools to build production AI agents is tempting but not recommended because it creates maintenance burden, SaaS registration bureaucracy, and compliance overhead that dedicated agent platforms handle out of the box.
Cursor is already used by 17% of all respondents and 21% of engineers despite launching just two years ago, signaling rapid adoption of AI-native development environments.
Podcast Moments
“100% of my code is written by Claude Code. I have not edited a single line by hand since November. Every day, I ship 10, 20, 30 pull requests.”
Boris Cherny · Boris Cherny
“In a year or two, it's not going to matter. Coding is virtually solved. I imagine a world where everyone is able to program, anyone can just build software any time.”
Boris Cherny · Boris Cherny
“I don't have a coding background. My job is to build both internal tools and customer-facing products purely using AI. The key is knowing what to build, not how to build it.”
The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder) · Lazar Jovanovic
“The biggest mistake people make is starting too big. Start with something you actually need. My first project was a simple dashboard for tracking my own metrics.”
The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder) · Lazar Jovanovic
“Internal tools are the sweet spot for vibe coding. The bar for quality is lower, the feedback loop is faster, and the value is immediate.”
The rise of the professional vibe coder (a new AI-era job) | Lazar Jovanovic (Professional Vibe Coder) · Lazar Jovanovic
“I'm a PM at Meta with zero coding background. I built a full internal tool using Cursor in three days. It's now used by my entire team daily.”
The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) · Zevi Arnovitz
“Start with your own pain point. Don't try to build a startup. Build something you need. The motivation to finish is completely different when you're the user.”
The non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor | Zevi Arnovitz (Meta) · Zevi Arnovitz
“Vibe coding is exactly good for this — Cursor and DigitalOcean and Cloudflare will get you a long way. But vibe coding also doesn't really scale.”
How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook | Sam Lessin · Sam Lessin
“Vibe coding is over-hyped. People don't realize how much it's going to make your systems unmaintainable in the long-term.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI) · Edwin Chen
“Vibe coding is highly limiting. We're trying to push Goose to work not just for five minutes at a time but for hours.”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“One of the things I do regularly is just throw away huge amounts of code. What would our world look like if every release deleted the entire app and rebuilt from scratch?”
How Block is becoming the most AI-native enterprise in the world | Dhanji R. Prasanna · Dhanji R. Prasanna
“100% of our code is AI-written. Five products, seven-figure revenue. The quality bar has crossed the threshold where AI code is production-ready for most use cases.”
The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · Dan Shipper
“The gap between demo and production is real. AI can write code fast, but making it reliable requires iteration. We spend about 30% of our time on polish and reliability.”
The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code | Dan Shipper (co-founder/CEO of Every) · Dan Shipper
“There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept. We live in a time when it's very easy to produce things at incredibly high production values, but they don't mean anything. They're just fancy potato chips. There's no nourishment there.”
35 years of product design wisdom from Apple, Disney, Pinterest, and beyond | Bob Baxley · Bob Baxley
“The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude Code team. They're using Claude Code to build Claude Code in a very self-improving kind of way. Over half of our pull requests are Claude Code generated. Probably at this point it's over 70%.”
Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Mike Krieger
“I would bias less toward trying in one go to tell the model exactly what to do. Instead chop things up into bits. You're specifying a little bit, getting a little bit of work. At the same time, explicitly try to fall on your face and discover the limits of what the models can do.”
The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO) · Michael Truell
“We tasked everyone at our company to build an app with Windsurf. We've saved over half a million dollars of SaaS products we were going to buy because our go-to-market team has now built apps instead of buying them.”
Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1 million developers in four months: The untold story of Windsurf | Varun Mohan (co-founder and CEO) · Varun Mohan
“People could be more full stack. Imagine a designer that can ship a fully baked product, a product manager that can prototype and ship to production. We shouldn't put limits on ourselves and what we can build.”
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js) · Guillermo Rauch
“You can be as ambitious as you want. If you have technical skills, have some suspension of disbelief. Focus more on the product description, what do you want the end user to experience. Try to be open-minded about how well the tool can implement it.”
Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js) · Guillermo Rauch
“Sonnet was really the first model that flipped the equation. We actually tried building Bolt almost exactly a year ago, with the frontier models at the time. Spent a week or two building it. It just didn't work. The output, the code output was not reliable enough. And then we got a sneak peek of the Sonnet stuff in May and we were like, 'Oh. Okay, we should take that project back off the shelf.'”
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · Eric Simons
“I would say, talk to this thing like you do a Linear ticket, or a JIRA ticket. That would be my advice. Talk to this like you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Be specific on things that matter. And on things where you can let it be creative, you can just say, 'Hey, make it prettier.' And it does a really good job when you give it just, vibes.”
Inside Bolt: From near-death to ~$40m ARR in 5 months—one of the fastest-growing products in history | Eric Simons (founder and CEO of StackBlitz) · Eric Simons
“Lovable is your personal AI software engineer. You describe an idea and then you get a fully working product. The reason is to enable those who have had such a hard time finding people who are good at creating software that's been their absolute bottleneck and let them take their ideas and their dreams into reality.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“Just start simple and then what you get is that the AI says, okay, I can go through what does a beautiful Airbnb clone look like and it goes through a bit of design decisions and then I'll zoom out to see more of it. We have this just UI that is... I mean it has all the nice things you would expect from Airbnb clone where you see different categories and you can see two listings from Airbnb with login buttons and everything.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The idea behind Replit is that making software today is very difficult. We want to make it easier. People view this as a developer in their pocket essentially. We have 34 million users globally.”
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO) · Amjad Masad
“Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas.”
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO) · Amjad Masad
“There's this tool called websim where you can just type in a URL that doesn't exist and it will generate the entire website for you. It's wild. I think it shows you where things are going.”
Dylan Field live at Config: Intuition, simplicity, and the future of design · Dylan Field
Cutting Room Floor
Guest insights on this topic that Lenny hasn't (yet) written about in his newsletters. Potential material for future posts.
“Just start simple and then what you get is that the AI says, okay, I can go through what does a beautiful Airbnb clone look like and it goes through a bit of design decisions and then I'll zoom out to see more of it. We have this just UI that is... I mean it has all the nice things you would expect from Airbnb clone where you see different categories and you can see two listings from Airbnb with login buttons and everything.”
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people | Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO) · Anton Osika
“The idea behind Replit is that making software today is very difficult. We want to make it easier. People view this as a developer in their pocket essentially. We have 34 million users globally.”
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO) · Amjad Masad
“Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas.”
Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO) · Amjad Masad