In January, 18-year-old Justin Jin introduced Giggles — an AI-powered social entertainment app that has already drawn over 120,000 people to its waitlist and generated 150 million impressions. Remarkably, this momentum came without venture capital backing, a marketing budget, or a conventional engineering team. Instead, Jin and his young co-founders harnessed AI to create a platform for Gen Alpha and Gen Z, blending AI-generated content, digital collectibles, and gamified social experiences.
Soon after, another player emerged — Base44, founded by a non-technical creator who used AI to “vibe code” a no-code development tool. Within six months, with fewer than ten team members, it achieved profitability, reached 300,000 users, and sold to Wix for $80 million in cash, as reported by TechCrunch. Together, these companies highlight a new startup archetype: ventures driven not by traditional coding teams but by creativity, culture, and AI orchestration.
AI is enabling visionaries without computer-science backgrounds to build platform-level products. Still, doubts remain — can this model scale without deep engineering expertise? The concept of “vibe coding,” coined by Andrej Karpathy, encapsulates this trend: creating with AI by simply speaking ideas. “You fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists,” Karpathy tweeted earlier this year.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan notes that many startups now generate up to 95% of their code through AI, achieving what once took teams of 50–100 engineers with fewer than ten people. But as Business Insider’s Alistair Barr observed, this shift is fundamentally altering SaaS economics while raising new risks. Nigel Douglas of Cloudsmith cautions that, in business, the wrong tool can cause serious issues like data breaches or outages.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke echoed these concerns at VivaTech in Paris: “A non-technical founder will find it difficult to build a startup at scale without developers,” warning that vibe coding alone doesn’t provide the depth needed for serious investment. Even AI-native founders acknowledge the gaps. “There’s a need to build technical depth. We know that’s important and are expanding engineering operations and bringing on advisors,” said Edwin Wang, Giggles co-founder.
Jin’s earlier venture, Mediababy, sold for $3.8 million, influencing his belief that platforms should prioritize user expression over rigid structures. On Giggles, that vision materialized in a storytelling-driven, prompt-based creative hub where users engage with AI-generated videos, collectibles, and daily quests. “Creators aren’t limited to just posting photos and videos. They can vibe code a game, develop an app, create a whole virtual world and post it on Giggles,” added co-founder Matthew Hershoff.
The challenge for Giggles — and other AI-native ventures — lies in evolving from viral spark to sustainable infrastructure. While AI accelerates the early build phase, scaling securely and reliably demands engineering rigor. Jin’s team appears to understand this, with Wang acknowledging that “scaling creativity still requires coding discipline.”
Looking ahead, the likely winners will be “hybrid founders” — creatively driven, AI-fluent visionaries who bring in seasoned engineers to fortify their products. As Reid Hoffman puts it, “bringing AI into your toolkit makes you enormously attractive,” but sustaining an edge requires robust testing, review, and security practices.
Ultimately, vibe coding may define this era’s startup genesis, but endurance will come from structure, execution, and human judgment. Or, as Jin sums it up: “It’s not just about who can build fast. It’s about who can build something that lasts.”