A non-coder built 3 apps in 2 months using AI — here’s the series
Matt Blumberg, who writes the Startup CEO blog, last touched code in 1980 on either a TRS-80 or a Commodore 64. He’s not sure which. Over the past two months, he built three pieces of software using AI-assisted vibe coding. One of them has over 40,000 lines of code he has never read.
That’s the premise of his five-part series, which he describes as the longest he’s ever written. The audience is explicitly non-technical: business owners and leaders who are curious about vibe coding but haven’t committed to trying it.
What the series covers
Each entry in the series walks through a real project Blumberg built. The framing is deliberately practical: what each project cost, what it taught, and what went wrong. He’s upfront that the mistakes are the most useful part.
He also draws a distinction worth noting. Citing Simon Willison, Blumberg separates vibe coding from agentic engineering. Vibe coding means you don’t read the code at all. You judge the output by whether it works. Agentic engineering means someone actually reads the code and owns its quality and security. Most non-technical founders doing this are in the first camp.
The honest caveat
Blumberg flags something most vibe coding boosters skip: most first builds don’t pay for themselves in hours saved. He calls time savings the least interesting reason to do this.
That’s a useful frame for anyone considering a first project. The real returns seem to be in learning what AI can actually produce, not in immediate productivity gains.
Why it’s worth watching
The audience here is solopreneurs and operators who want to build internal tools, automate workflows, or prototype ideas without hiring a developer. Blumberg’s series is a worked example from someone with zero recent coding background, not a tutorial from a developer who learned to use Cursor. That’s a different and more relevant perspective for most people in this newsletter’s readership.
Part I covers what vibe coding is, why you’d consider doing it, and what kinds of projects are worth building. The remaining four parts follow.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
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