Vibe coding and the one-person start-up, with Lovable’s Anton Osika

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Hey there, Pioneers of AI listeners!

We are just back from the Masters of Scale Summit. It’s two days of non-stop learning and inspiration with visionary leaders, live in San Francisco.

I had so many dynamic conversations – on stage and off – about some of the biggest breakthroughs and challenges of our time. Today, we’re bringing you my live chat with Anton Osika (ON-tawn OH-seek-uh). He’s the founder of Lovable. It’s one of the fastest growing platforms for “vibe coding” – building software by just talking to AI about what you want to create.

This is truly revolutionary. I believe vibe-coding will change how the next great companies are made – and help democratize who can create them.

I can’t wait to share my conversation with Anton Osika of Lovable. Let’s jump in.

EL KALIOUBY: That’s awesome. Hi everybody. Hello again. Anton. Alright. Right, so vibe coding. Vibe coding is rewriting the rules of creation with nothing more than a conversation with AI, anyone. No coding skills required can now build apps and websites in minutes. Leading this charge is Anton Osika, founder of Lovable.

In less than a year, Lovable has exploded to a hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue and a $1.8 billion valuation, all by empowering people who’ve never written a line of code to bring their ideas to life. It’s wild. So I wanna do this. If you’ve heard of vibe coding, please stand up and we’re gonna stand up.

Cool. All right, now stay standing up if you’ve actually built something this way. Okay. All right. So look around. This is the frontier we’re stepping into. And for anyone still thinking, wait, vibe — what? Vibe coding is essentially using an AI chatbot to bring your ideas to life. It makes you more creative, helps you get stuff done.

Copy LinkWhy vibe coding is a real shift in how humans build software

Faster and smarter, and we are gonna dig in. So Anton, the numbers are just crazy. A hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue in under a year, investors are literally chasing you. My question for you is, beyond the hype, is vibe coding a technological shift or just the next fad?

OSIKA: Right. So vibe coding is the word people use for the new way of creating software, which is you don’t look at the code, you explain in plain English, and then you look at the software that AI is building for you and you use the software, keep talking to the AI until you’re happy.

And it’s a very natural shift where humans used to look at the zeros and ones that the computers are reading. No one is doing that anymore. And the same thing is going to happen for the next translation — we talk to the computer in the same way that we talk to other humans. It’s a very, very natural shift.

And exactly how the new interface looks like — it’s just a chat and the preview of the application you’re building. That’s to be decided. Maybe we’re going to talk about it on video and explain like you’re talking to a designer in the future. But this is obviously the future, where you can vibe code much faster than you write normal software.

And you can take your idea to an application in what used to take people like six months — it can be done in a few hours these days.

EL KALIOUBY: You’re really changing the de facto human-machine interface in a way which is really powerful. So Adam, my 16-year-old son, literally vibe codes his way into anything. He’s already built a social app called CIP and a bunch of websites using tools like Lovable. And in preparation for this interview, I got creative and I built my own Lovable app called Hidden Gems.

‘Cause I love traveling. I don’t know if it’s gonna be the next billion dollar startup, but it was really cool ’cause I felt like I had my own personal AI engineer in a way. And so I —

OSIKA: We say it’s your technical co-founder if you want to build a business from this.

Copy LinkHow AI turns non-technical creators into builders and founders

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. We’re gonna get to that. ‘Cause I think it is changing entrepreneurship, but I wanna hear from you, what are some of your favorite companies that have been built on Lovable?

OSIKA: Sure.

EL KALIOUBY: And how many, like, give us a sense of scale.

OSIKA: Yeah. So now more than a hundred thousand new projects are created every single day. That’s, yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: Crazy.

OSIKA: And many of those become very serious businesses with substantial revenue in themselves. So we’re seeing a lot of traffic to Lovable obviously, but we are seeing more than 10 times as much traffic on the applications that are being built on top of the platform.

And I just wanna first say — Lovable makes it faster to build things, but the big change is the accessibility. Like a 16-year-old being able to create a social network is just insane. Right? Less than 1% have been able to create software in the past, with access to the capital required to put together a full team.

That used to be required — it’s very, very scarce. But now the 99% are able to build, and 99% of the good ideas are in the 99% who were not able to before. So I think it’s a complete transformation in how the software economy is going to look. And some examples.

They’re coming from all around the world, which is beautiful. There’s a founder, Kyle, in Brazil, who had built a company before — Education Company Q Group — and as part of him being a founder there, he built out a new premium line for the education company.

He made $3 million in 48 hours. Amazing. On existing distribution channels, but still — huge changes. Leonard recently built out a full product that he sold for a six-figure deal. And now he’s in Y Combinator building this into a full business. And every day there are thousands of new companies starting to build out their software on Lovable.

EL KALIOUBY: We’ll be right back after a break.

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Copy LinkWhy solo entrepreneurs and big companies are both embracing vibe coding

So you really are changing the face of entrepreneurship and democratizing access to entrepreneurship. With vibe coding, one person, as you said, can now do what an entire team used to do. And it used to be that if you were a non-technical founder, you had to find a technical co-founder.

How is vibe coding changing all of that? And actually, are you seeing more solo founders and do you think we’re gonna see a one-person unicorn?

OSIKA: Yes. We want to be the platform where the first one-person unicorn is built. And helping you do everything across the entire product lifecycle — building the software, publishing it, understanding your users, improving the product based on understanding your users, getting paid, adding payments — and being confident when you’re changing software that is running in production.

There’s a lot of things to be built out for vibe coding to go from “you can build businesses” to fully operating the businesses, with everything being as reliable as if you have a human software engineering team. And that’s what we’re seeing now — many of the world’s largest companies, like 30% of Fortune 1000 companies, are using Lovable today as well.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. That was surprising to me. It’s not just entrepreneurs that are building something from scratch. It’s all these big companies as well, embracing Lovable. Give us an example.

OSIKA: I was at Meta’s office here in the Bay yesterday and there, it’s used for many different things.

Naturally when you have software engineers, they use many things in companies. The finance team built tools where they would’ve wanted to hire an engineer, but they’re all super busy and very constrained.

Backlogged months out on the tool for headcount planning, and product managers and designers.

Who previously could only create static wireframes of what should be built. They often wrote long documents that no one wanted to read. They have this mantra now saying, “demo don’t memo,” because —

EL KALIOUBY: I love that.

OSIKA: Because if you actually show the real thing, even a new feature of your product with AI functionality — you can, in one prompt, get an AI product in Lovable — then it conveys so much more information than a wireframe or a long document.

And you can much more rapidly validate what you should actually build and where you should spend those engineering resources that are doing some of the heavy lifting if you’re putting it into an existing system. At Facebook, there’s still engineers doing a lot of the plumbing.

So the 60% of the work in the product lifecycle is compressed to a large extent either way.

Copy LinkWho benefits most as software becomes easier and cheaper to create

EL KALIOUBY: So you’re not just disrupting tech, you are really shaping entire economic structures. And in this world, I’m curious who wins and who loses. I’ll give an example — what industries will be upended by vibe coding in the same way that social media upended publishing, for instance.

OSIKA: So consumers win. There are more choices, higher quality products, and you don’t have to pay as much for software. I think human creativity flourishes when more people have access to creating, and that’s why we’re building Lovable. But I do think that some SaaS companies that are relying on hefty margins today are going to naturally see a decline in their revenue.

When there’s more choice — some single-person startups where the founder has great product taste and they can work tightly with AI to create a superior product that consumers prefer, and that is being sold at a lower price.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And I know you’re very passionate about Lovable not just changing who gets to build, but where innovation happens — basically anywhere with an internet connection can essentially become an innovation hub.

I’m originally from Cairo, so I’m thinking back to Egypt. Are you already seeing that? And what are the second order effects when that becomes the case?

OSIKA: Yeah. It’s very interesting in how our tools see much broader adoption compared to other SaaS across the globe. South America is enormous, Asia, Africa — all countries. I think we looked at a map and we couldn’t see anyone from North Korea, but it’s because they use VPNs in North Korea, apparently. And we’re seeing a lot of entrepreneurs building real businesses from all of these places where it was, I mean, very hard to find people who were really good at creating software and wanted to get employed in their local currencies to a large extent.

And now with a pure technical co-founder that works extremely fast, this is clearly an example of AI actually empowering people, which I’m very excited about.

EL KALIOUBY: More to come, after a quick break.

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Copy LinkWhat vibe coding means for software engineers and technical careers

All right. I have a confession to make. I’ve spent a lot of years learning how to code. I did four years of undergrad as a computer scientist, two years of a master’s degree, and then another five years of a PhD.

So that’s more than a decade of my life. So I want you to be honest. Will there be a need for software engineers and computer scientists?

OSIKA: So if you take software development, right? What is happening is that everyone is becoming a software developer.

And what that means is that if you are great at understanding the technical details, you’re also going to be a great software developer in the future. To really shine, I encourage everyone to become more of a generalist, a “learn-it-all,” and that’s easier than ever before these days.

And we’re seeing the best engineers learning more of the product manager and designer skill sets. But if you have a technical background, you often have a stronger ability to translate real-world problems to technical solutions, independent of which tools you’re using.

So you have an edge — you’re a better vibe coder than most people out there because of your background, first.

Copy LinkThe skills that make someone exceptional at building with AI

EL KALIOUBY: Let’s talk about that.

‘Cause traditional coding is very structured. It’s rigid. It’s logical, but vibe coding feels, I don’t know, a little bit more intuitive, fluid, even conversational, emotional. For everybody here in the audience, what makes an exceptional vibe coder, because we all need to be that.

OSIKA: True. So it still requires a lot of structured analytical, critical thinking. So if you take a product manager as an example — there are really, really good product managers and then there are product managers that just add more features into the product until it’s bloated and unintuitive to use.

And the same is true for when you’re vibe coding. You should break down the problem of who is going to use this product, what are the most important features, and figure out the right flow for them to solve their job to be done — and be able to dig into some of the more complex features only when they need to.

That requires a lot of thinking. And expert practice building many applications is the best way to develop that. So it is much easier to learn, but it still takes a lot of patience to understand some of the technicalities.

EL KALIOUBY: Patience is interesting as we start collaborating more and more with these AIs. I think patience is an interesting skill.

OSIKA: Yeah. A hundred percent. And I think we aren’t as good at it as we used to be, as humans this decade. Like, I tell all my friends who are like, “oh, but is AI going to take my job?” I just tell them — no, look. Sit down for one full day, or a few days even better, with a new AI tool. And if you just do that, you’re going to be better than almost everyone else, and probably everyone in your company, at using this new tool.

And that’s going to give you such an edge and such a superpower. And with tools like Lovable, you can just try to build something. When you get confused — which you will the first time you do it — you just ask the AI, tell it what you’re thinking, like why isn’t this doing what I think it should do?

And you just learn so rapidly. If you have that patience and determination to become really good at an AI tool, it is an extremely rapid advance in your productivity. Amazing.

Copy LinkWhy empathy and product judgment matter more in an AI-driven world

EL KALIOUBY: We just heard from Brene Brown — she talked about empathy, so I wanna dig into that. If AI can write the code, does empathy become our superpower as humans?

OSIKA: Yes. At some point maybe computers have more empathy than us, but so far —

EL KALIOUBY: I spent like 25 years trying to build empathy into machines, so we’re —

OSIKA: I think completely true what you’re saying. The biggest bottleneck for building good software products is some kind of product judgment and just empathy for what your customers want, and translating those user needs to the machines to do the execution for you.

EL KALIOUBY: Incredible. Looking ahead, say, five years from now, what percent of software do you think will be engineered versus vibed?

OSIKA: Five years?

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. Is that too long? That’s too long.

OSIKA: No, I think in five years, all the new software that gets built is going to be built by explaining in plain English what you want to build.

And there’s probably going to be a bit of whiteboarding together with AI of how you want the software to work as well when it gets more detailed, more technical. But I think there will be handwritten code in the same sense that there are handmade clothes. This is probably not handmade — but otherwise, no.

Copy LinkWhere competitive advantage comes from when anyone can build anything

EL KALIOUBY: Fascinating. Okay. So if patents, capital, and headcount no longer guarantee an edge, what does? And in this world, where will competitive advantages come from? Is it brand, trust, community, scale?

OSIKA: I believe in trust being the most important thing for almost any company to focus on.

And the way you build that is by really focusing on your customers and rapidly improving a product that they trust. That trust and brand brings people back to you. It creates a community of people helping each other succeed with your product. And then, if you want to think about moats — which is often less useful right now, since everything’s happening so rapidly — moats aren’t so important to think about.

But there are other network effects where you build exit barriers based on having a platform where you’ve built out all your existing assets. System of records is of course something to think about.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Your tagline is “build anything.” And it’s clear that this is already unfolding.

But I can’t help but wonder what happens to human ambition, collaboration, struggling — all of these qualities that are so important to personal growth. Are we basically liberating human potential, or are we accidentally engineering ourselves away from what makes us truly human?

OSIKA: Look, it’s important to me that as AI becomes more powerful and does more things, human creativity is still the driver of what we put out there in the world. That empowers us to feel self-actualized. And that’s a big part of the mission of why we’re building Lovable.

EL KALIOUBY: Incredible. Last question.

When we look back, a decade or a century from now, vibe coding may be remembered as a kind of turning point around creation. I’ve heard you say that you wrote something down recently about what you want Lovable to mean for the future and for future generations. Can you share that with everyone?

OSIKA: We focus on building a very, very good product — a generational product that I can tell my grandchildren about, how we built it and they’re still using it. That’s what we want to achieve, and to empower the 99% to be part of the creation economy.

EL KALIOUBY: I love that. Very inspiring. Thank you. Thank you for this awesome conversation. I’ll give you a hug ’cause I’m a hugger.