Startups, Vibe Coding, and the Unexpected Lifeline of AI

Startups, Vibe Coding, and the Unexpected Lifeline of AI

by William McCann

These are tough times to launch a startup.

Founders today are navigating a perfect storm—rising costs, political uncertainty, a tightening economy, and a venture landscape increasingly dominated by AI moonshots. The funding well is deep, but the water’s being siphoned by billion-dollar models.

Ironically, it’s AI that may end up saving you.

Over the past two years, AI-assisted development has reshaped what’s possible. Tools that didn’t exist 24 months ago are now making it feasible for lean teams—or even solo devs—to build in weeks what used to take quarters.

I saw it firsthand just last week. In an unscripted demo during a talk, I used bolt.new to generate a working multiplayer chess game—with a twist: every three turns, a random piece vanishes. That prototype was up and running in minutes. A year ago, that would have taken a team and a sprint.

The tech community calls this Vibe Coding. The name is catchy, but the shift is real. It’s the practice of building software through a fluid, back-and-forth interaction with AI tools. Sometimes it’s fully prompt-driven: “Build me a SaaS app for managing studio rentals.” Other times it’s more like having a tireless junior dev on standby: “Refactor this API,” “Write a test for this edge case,” “What’s the time complexity of this loop?”

It’s less like writing formal specs and more like a conversation. You describe what you want, and the code follows. Vibe coders are more like technical product managers than pure coders.

Of course, these tools aren’t magic. They require a skilled pilot—someone who can steer the AI, spot its blind spots, and shape its output into something robust, secure, and scalable. AI doesn’t replace expertise—it amplifies it.

The spectrum of tools is expanding fast. Builders now have access to platforms that scaffold entire apps from scratch, copilots that autocomplete entire functions, bots that write documentation, and assistants that lint, test, debug, and optimize in real-time.

As a founder, this isn’t just an interesting shift. It’s strategic. Your tech partner—whether a co-founder, an early hire, or a contractor—can now be 10x more productive if they’ve embraced the vibe.

The productivity gap between a developer who uses AI and one who doesn’t is no longer incremental—it’s a chasm. One is writing code with hand tools. The other is operating a semi-automated factory. Both can build a house, but not on the same budget or timeline.

So here’s my advice:

Find the partner who’s already vibe coding.
Someone who’s using these tools fluently. Who’s not afraid of AI, but curious about what it unlocks. Who understands that building fast isn’t the same as building sloppy—and knows how to do both when needed.

In this era of constrained resources, that kind of leverage isn’t optional.
It’s existential.