No Code. No Team. $80M Exit.

THIS WEEK’S STORY

The AI Coding Adoption Gap

It’s funny because every once in a while I stumble upon the same thing; people still heavily resisting AI coding where I thought that kind of mindset belonged to the past.

There’s a massive gap between those who have fully embraced AI and can’t imagine coding without it, and those who not only don’t get it, but actively fight it out of ignorance of the tools and the actual usefulness behind AI-assisted development.

This came up in a recent conversation I had with someone from a large outsourced dev agency. They were worried about using AI for client work and insisted their developers code everything manually. No AI.

He even shared a story about a client who got upset after finding out their app was built in one day using AI instead of over several weeks with manual coding. That logic puzzles me; the goal should be to ship the app, not drag it out.

The result matters more than the process.

Of course, you still need to double check your vibe-coded app for vulnerabilities, secure authentication flows, database queries, API routes, and backend logic; but none of that cancels out how much faster AI can get you there.

Take Claude Code for example; Anthropic’s new dev agent was 90% coded using Claude itself. The remaining 10% was manually refined with the help of more AI.

All of this to say: there are still so many people who don’t know how to build with AI and don’t realize how powerful it is. This puts founders who do want to learn at a huge advantage. You’re still early. Learn to build with AI now.

But keep this in mind; AI coding is like using a power drill instead of a screwdriver. You’ll get the job done much faster, but if you don’t know how to operate it properly, if you misalign the screw or apply too much force, you’ll end up wrecking everything around it.

HEADLINES

Six-Month-Old Solo Startup Acquired for $80M

Let this sink in: a solo founder, zero funding, no team until a few weeks ago, just got acquired for $80 million in cash.

Wix is buying Base44, a dev tool startup built entirely by 31-year-old Israeli founder Maor Shlomo. The craziest part? He launched it just four months ago. No investors. No hype cycle. Just a man, a laptop, and some serious vibe coding.

In May alone, Base44 made $189K in profit. Not revenue. Profit. Then in June, he hired six employees and closed one of the cleanest acquisitions we’ve seen in years. All while rockets were literally flying over his head. That’s grit.

This is what AI-native building looks like. No bloated teams. No VC circus. Just speed, clarity, and execution. The new wave of builders don’t wait for permission. They use AI to ship faster, test cheaper, and reach product-market fit in record time.

And when you do that, $80M exits become very real, very fast.

You don’t need a cofounder. You don’t need a CTO. You don’t need a 5-year roadmap.

You need a problem.
You need AI.
And you need the guts to build.

Maor just showed us the blueprint. Now it’s your turn.

QUICK HITS

• MIT’s SEAL Lets AI Self-Improve: New MIT framework enables large language models to self-generate training data, boosting their performance and puzzle-solving skills autonomously.

• Sakana AI’s Darwin Gödel Machine Self-Edits Code: Innovative coding agent autonomously reads, rewrites, and optimizes its own codebase, significantly reducing human intervention.

• Apple Leverages Generative AI for Chip Design: Apple adopts generative AI tools to accelerate custom chip development, signaling broader AI integration in hardware engineering.

• Enterprise AI Budgets Soar, Multi-Model Use Expands: CIOs report 75% AI budget growth, with companies increasingly using multiple specialized models and shifting towards buying AI-native solutions like Cursor.

• Cursor Enhances Code Verification and Style Matching: Cursor’s AI agents now autonomously verify and match organizational code styles and standards, allowing developers to focus on strategic architecture.

And That is all for this week!

See you next Saturday!

Filippo

Filippo Pietrantonio

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