But the underlying point, I think, is that the right tool in the right hands is an extraordinary thing, especially when you bring execution closer to smart visionaries who aren’t otherwise technical. I can’t sit here in denial that LLMs have drastically changed things to that effect, whether I like it or not.
Software - at seed stage - was never a moat. It was just a prerequired (and scarce) resource. Classic example: Dropxbox in 2007 [1].
That's not the case anymore (or won't be, at some point soon).
If it can be commoditized, why not just steal the idea and give it to a tried-and-true professional CEO
Anyone could have used Markov Chains to implement PageRank in 1997, but no one did. And Dropbox was laughed at here on HN for being a simple python wrapper for ftp. Any "tried-and-true professional CEO" had the resources to implement something 10x better, but they didn't. It happens that CEOs are usually busy delivering quarterly results, and won't chase every shiny opportunity.
My point (and the article's) is that until recently it was nearly impossible for startup founders to go from 0 to 1 without strong technical skills. Non-technical founders were almost always DOA: too costly to get to an MVP, and no VC would fund someone who doesn't have something concrete to show. Brian Chesky (Airbnb) comes to mind as one of the few counterexamples.
That barrier is now drastically reduced. I'd go as far as to say that the new stereotypical startup founder for the next decade is someone coming from a product / design background, and not engineering / computer science.
While this may be a real human reality, the way it's presented is in the golly-gee-whiz, I'm just a farm-folk engineer.
If you meant this to be convincing, it's not. It looks like copy-paste-find-replace of all these other tech blogs where they found $SHINYNEWEVIDENCE of $MODUS_OPERANDI and you should too.
The author is Brad Feld [1], who wrote checks to thousands of startups, wrote a dozen books, and advises a bunch of founders. He's talking about his personal experience observing the shift in the typical profile of a startup entrepreneur.
I think his perspective is very valid. For the past 20 years we assumed (and confirmed through empirical evidence) that having a technical co-founder was critical for the success of a startup.
This era is getting to an end, and the next 20 will be radically different in the next 20. You'll probably still need human engineering skills to scale, but getting from 0 to 1 will depend much more on taste than how good you are in <language X>.
What does Linux kernel Devs know about real software development anyway? [1]
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/greg_kroahhartman_ai_...
But is it possible to build real apps that work well? I can absolutely confirm. Deploying software that's used by household names.
I think people are making a lot of false dichotomy around this, just because there's AI slop doesn't mean that it never works.
Responsible adults say that vibe-coding a serious product is a bad idea, because you aren’t capable of recognizing or fixing certain serious problems that commonly arise.
