Last month, Israeli developer Maor Shlomo sold his six-month-old bootstrapped startup Base44 to Wix for $80 million cash. What made the deal unique was that Shlomo had been running his company without any other co-founders. Instead, to build the value of his startup, which has a platform that allows users to build fully-functioning applications without any need for code, the experienced engineer used a handful of employees and used vibe coding to do most of his work.
PREMIUM The term ‘vibe coding’ was coined earlier this year in February by OpenAI’s co-founder Andrej Karpathy in a tweet. Calling it a new kind of coding, Karpathy talked on how he coded with Large Language Models, where he prompted the artificial intelligence (AI) model to give him a code and tried to use it. If the code presented any error message, Karpathy posted the message as an add-on comment so the AI model could fix it. This coding didn’t really need knowledge of programming language or technical specs. All you needed was knowledge of English to give the right prompts to the model. “The hottest new programming language is English,” concluded Karpathy in another tweet, adding that vibe coding is the style of building software not by writing lines of code but by describing what you want to AI – in written or spoken English.
Last year OpenAI’s more popular co-founder Sam Altman prophesied that AI will soon allow a founder to build to a billion-dollar valuation without hiring a single employee. “In my group chat with tech CEOs there is a betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company,” he said in an interview to Reddit ex co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
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Technology companies have always been slim when it comes to number of employees versus their valuation. When Facebook acquired Whatsapp for a whopping $19 billion, the messaging app was only 55 employees. Instagram was 13 employees when Facebook bought it. Recently, Microsoft bought Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion. They had only 40 employees. Nvidia has a market cap of more than $3 trillion with only 30,000 employees – that’s $100 million in value per employee. Shlomo’s Base44 had 8 employees when it was acquired.
Though what Altman said might turn out to be an exaggeration, vibe coding has brought down the cost of building digital products. Ever since AI agents came into the world, the job market hasn’t recovered. Startups are letting go of contractors and replacing jobs with AI. Last month, DuoLingo announced it will replace its translating contractors with AI.
Replacing humans with AI even has a new term: AI employees. Billboards on Freeway 101 which connects South Bay to San Francisco, offer companies employees who don’t need work-life balance, or even weekends off. And there is demand for such AI developers. Cursor, an AI code editor, has hit $100 million in recurring revenue faster than any startup in history and has become the dominant AI code editor according to Ramp.com’s recent data. Another startup Cognition advertised Devin as the world’s first AI software engineer.
What we’re seeing is a drastic reduction in coding costs, but as two of my engineering friends have said, digital products are way more than code. Even the best AI models have a long way to go before they can automate coding work. Challenges aside, there is a possibility that we will work with or manage AI employees in some form or the other in a future job.
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While tech CEOs might want every human employee to work with or manage AI employees, are we ready for it? Though I’m not prejudiced against working with AI employees, I just find the idea lonely and boring. Imagine starting a company – which is anyway a lonely journey – and having to do it all alone, without real team mates. It sounds exhausting!
In his own journey, Altman had a knack of choosing the right human team mates and got to where he was thanks to a brilliant team. Now he imagines a solo entrepreneur chiseling away on a digital product surrounded by synthetic employees. Even the solo unicorn happens, I feel slight pity for the founder who does it. They might become a billionaire but they will have no human to share the joy with.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.
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