The New Startup Stack That’s Beating 10-Person Teams
Vibe coding sounds like a joke. But it’s how solo founders are launching working apps, testing real demand, and skipping months of dev time.
Quick Insights 🔎
Startup snippets
You’re Probably Not the 8%
Only 8% of people are wired for entrepreneurship and they’re 8x more likely to succeed. If you're still asking “Can I start a startup?”, the answer is: not without someone who doesn’t ask.Every Marketing Channel Is Broken
SEO? Slow. Ads? Expensive. Influencers? No ROI. Andrew Chen thinks the old growth playbook is cooked. Startups need Little Channels, scrappy, weird, unscalable stuff that actually works when no one’s watching.This Is the Worst AI You'll Ever Use
OpenAI’s Kevin Weil says today’s models are the floor, not the ceiling. From vibe coding to eval-driven dev, he lays out how AI-native teams are already working and why chat is here to stay.
Startup mental model 🧠
Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect occurs when a person’s lack of knowledge and skill in a certain area causes them to overestimate their own competence. Early traction can make you feel like a genius. Be careful. Overconfidence peaks before competence. Stay curious. Stay paranoid.
This week’s big idea 📈
How Startups Are Shipping MVPs in 72 Hours with Vibe Coding
Remember when building a product took a team of engineers, months of meetings, and enough coffee to kill a horse?
Now? One founder. One laptop. One weekend.
I recently watched a solo founder launch a saas product in 72 hours with AI doing most of the heavy lifting.
This isn’t some future fantasy. It’s here right now.
In March, a solo indie hacker shipped a flight sim using AI tools in days and made a tonne of money selling in-game ads. Y Combinator’s latest batch has startups where 95% of the codebase was AI-generated. Garry Tan said vibe coding lets 10 engineers do the work of 50.
Founders aren’t waiting for code reviews. They’re shipping.
So here’s what I cover in this week’s piece:
What vibe coding really means in practice
Tools founders are using right now to ship faster
A playbook to build with AI, even if you’re non-technical
The traps to avoid so you don’t end up with a pile of broken spaghetti
And why this window is your unfair advantage but it won’t last long
What the hell is Vibe Coding?
Vibe coding is Andrej Karpathy’s term for letting go. Forget the syntax. Forget the tools. Forget that the code even exists. Andrej Karpathy is a former Tesla AI lead and OpenAI cofounder. He isn’t some hype guy, he’s one of the people who helped build the tech making this possible.
You just describe what you want, and an AI generates the code. Then you run it. Then you fix it, because yeah, it’s never perfect first time around. Then you ship it. This isn’t “chatbot writing boilerplate.” It’s a full-stack development loop powered by prompting not typing. And if you’re using a tool like Wispr Flow, you don’t even need a keyboard. You can build with your voice.
If you’re even slightly curious about where this is all heading, this YC video is a must-watch on the future of how their startups are coding.
What this actually looks like
This isn’t theory. It’s already happening and it’s kind of insane.
One solo builder prompted Claude and Cursor to build a sci-fi strategy game from scratch.
He started with a simple ask:
“Build a turn-based 2D game on a 10x10 grid. Sci-fi theme.”
That was it.
A few hours later, he had:
✅ A working game loop
✅ Resource management and AI opponents
✅ Ships with roles, tooltips, and hit points
✅ A build menu, battle logic, and win conditions
✅ Debug commands, refactoring, even Git commits—all handled by AI
He used:
Grok to brainstorm the concept and rules
Claude 3.7 to guide architecture and logic
Cursor to build, fix, refactor, and test
GitHub to version it all, triggered by voice or text
He didn’t write a line of code. This is vibe coding in the wild.
Want to see it for yourself? Here’s the full video.
Why it matters (right now)
Startups live or die by how fast they get something in users’ hands.
Vibe coding obliterates the old bottlenecks:
No more waiting weeks for your outsourced dev shop to ship a login page.
No more headcount gymnastics to hire a founding engineer.
If you're a founder who can write a clear sentence, you're now a 1-person product team. That same solo-operator edge is already reshaping marketing too as Vibe Marketing Is Already Here.
Most startups haven’t noticed yet. The early-mover advantage is real.
Inside Vercel, the shift is already happening.
Their new tool, v0 built by Guillermo Rauch (the guy behind Next.js) turns prompts into real apps. No dev bottlenecks, no pixel-perfect Figma handoffs.
Every Friday, Vercel teams demo what they’ve built with v0 live tools, shipped features, not Figma frames.
Even the marketing team ships full products. Sometimes better than engineering.
v0 flipped the org chart. Everyone in Vercel is a designer and engineer now.
The tools behind the vibes
Here are the AI builders I’ve tested and used:
Lovable (Beginner-Friendly)
If you’re non-technical and want to launch something now, Lovable is your shortcut.
Type a prompt like “build me a task app with user logins and billing,” and it handles everything, frontend, backend, auth, Stripe, even hosting. You don’t see the code. You don’t need to. Perfect for validating ideas without touching a keyboard.
Replit (Intermediate Builder Mode)
Think of Replit as vibe coding with training wheels off. You still prompt in plain English, but it scaffolds real code across multiple frameworks such as Python, Node, React, etc. You can get hands-on with the codebase if you want. Great for semi-technical founders who want speed but don’t want to be locked out of the dev layer.
Cursor (Advanced)
Cursor is VS Code with a built-in brain. Highlight a bug, ask “why is this broken?”it tells you. Want to refactor or build a new feature? Prompt it in plain English. Best for technical founders who want to work fast, still ship real production apps, and don’t mind living in the codebase.
Windsurf (Advanced & Structured)
Windsurf is for power users who like order. It’s an AI-first IDE that helps you build full-stack web apps, but with more structure than Cursor. Think guided flows for backend, frontend, and API logic. Less chaos, more architecture. Perfect if you want to steer the AI like a senior dev, not a casual co-pilot.
V0 (Design-Focused)
v0 (built by Guillermo Rauch’s team at Vercel) is what you use when you want something beautiful fast. You describe a UI component, layout, or page, and it generates production-grade frontend code using Tailwind and React.
You’re not building the whole app, just the interface. Ideal for founders who want to skip Figma, skip designers, and still ship slick UIs.
The Vibe Coding MVP Playbook
If you’re thinking about using AI to build your MVP, don’t just open ChatGPT or Claude and start typing.
Here’s the founder-tested playbook:
Start with the problem.
Not the idea. What pain point are you solving? What’s the fastest way to test if users care?Break it into prompts.
Don’t ask the AI to “build a SaaS.” Ask it to “build a signup form with email and password validation.” Then iterate.Use the right tools for the right stage.
Need a frontend mockup? Try Claude or Cursor. Want to test live? Use Replit. Need a full stack MVP with logins and billing? Bolt or Lovable can get you there.Expect bugs.
This is AI code. You will need to test, fix, and refine. Think of the AI as a junior dev with speed but no judgment.Use Git (and GitHub).
The AI might overwrite working code. If you don’t version it, you’ll lose it. Git is like a time machine for your project and GitHub is where you store and track those versions inLaunch it ugly.
Don’t wait for perfect. Ship a version that barely works. Then gather feedback and keep going.
This isn’t about building “good code.” It’s about building momentum.
Not a coder? You can still build
You don’t need to write code. But you do need to think like a builder.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Cursor are more than code generators. Treat them like your AI engineering team. Talk through ideas. Ask questions. Make them explain what they built and why.
When something breaks, copy the error and paste it in.
Ask:
❓ What does this bug mean?
🛠 How do I fix it step by step?
You’ll get real answers you can follow.
But here’s the real edge.
If you understand how things actually work such as how APIs connect, why someone picks one stack over another you get better output. Faster and closer to what you imagined.
Not sure where to start? Ask:
What’s the best stack for a simple app with login, billing, and a dashboard?
The AI will walk you through it. It might even write the tutorial for you.
Just don’t prompt and pray. You’re not a passenger.
You’re the product lead.
Where people mess this up
Vibe coding can be powerful.
But it can also create a steaming pile of tech debt if you treat it like magic.
Here’s how it goes wrong:
No idea what the code does.
If you can’t explain your AI-generated MVP to a human engineer, you’re toast the second something breaks.No testing, no verification.
Just because it runs doesn’t mean it’s right. Especially for anything involving user data, payments, or auth flows.Treating AI like a cofounder.
It’s not. It’s a hyper-fast intern. You still need to make the product calls UX, onboarding, positioning. That’s still your job.Forgetting the transition.
The MVP might be vibe-coded. But if it works, you’ll eventually need humans to scale it. So document as you go, or future-you will hate you.
Recommended by Martin
🛠 Tool of the Week:
Cursor: I highly recommend learning Cursor. It’s more advanced than other tools, but it gives you way more control. You’ll be working with real code not just prompting for templates which means you can build more complex, production-ready apps.
📚 Book of the Week:
Inspired by Marty Cagan. This book is incredible. I’m currently listening to it on Spotify. Learn to design, build, and scale products consumers love.
🎧 Track of the Week:
Good Vibrations (lost studio footage) by The Beach Boys
Final thoughts
It’s the early innings of a power shift in how software gets built.
Right now, solo founders can out-ship 10-person teams.
The edge won’t last. Once everyone catches on, this won’t feel like a cheat code forever.. It’ll be the cost of entry.
But while the tools are still new and the playbook still unpolished you have a shot to build something that matters without raising a cent or writing a single function by hand.
This is the new startup stack:
👀 Identify the problem
🧠 Prompt the AI
🚢 Ship the MVP
🔁 Iterate with feedback
Don’t wait for clean code. Wait for users.
Until next week, keep building, no fairytales required.
Martin, Chief Ranter at Uncharted
p.s. If you enjoyed this, please hit the Like button below ♥️
Vibing with this!! Thanks for sharing, Martin.