In an era of unprecedented tech hype, one AI startup founder has a warning to those who would follow his footsteps: vibe coding a double-edged sword that makes it trivially easy for competitors to copy your brilliant company.
Israeli tech founder Maor Shlomo, whose vibe coding startup Base44 sold for over $80 million when it was acquired by Wix, said on the podcast “20VC” that “it’s relatively easy to create a vibe coding tool.”
“Every feature that we put out, we know that’s going to take either a few weeks or a few months for competitor to copy,” he complained.
First flagged by Business Insider, the founder is arguably the poster child of the financial feeding frenzy that’s come to define the AI era. In another podcast recorded in July, Shlomo claimed he used AI to write “90 percent of the code” for Base44. Over the last three months prior to the acquisition, he recalled, he hadn’t written “a single line of front-end code” himself.
But while vibe coding is easy — all it takes is an idea, if Shlomo’s to be taken at face value — building actual software infrastructure isn’t so simple.
“It’s very, very, very hard to create a platform that could help people build products they’ll actually use, that are functional, that are complex enough for real-world use cases,” Shlomo admitted on 20VC.
The founder’s sentiments echo those of Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI cofounder who coined the infamous term “vibe coding” earlier this year. “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works,” Karpathy wrote.
It’s an awesome foundation for a practice which is picking up billions of dollars of momentum in tech circles. Shlomo may be offering a particularly silly example of how fragile the AI economy has become, but he’s not wrong — if AI really does lead to a radical breakdown in the scarcity of intelligence, that’ll be extremely bad news for innovators.
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