Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

Yeah; there's still a massive chasm between "I spent hours precisely defining my requirements for this greenfield application with no users and the AI one-shot it" and "million line twenty team enterprise SaaS hellscale with ninety-seven stakeholders per line of code".

The fact that AI can actually handle the former case is, to be clear, awesome; but not surprising. Low-code tools have been doing it for years. Retool, even back in 2018, was way more productive than any LLMs I've seen today, at the things Retool could do. But its relative skill at these things, to me, does not conclusively determine that it is on the path toward being able to autonomously handle the latter.

The english language is simply a less formal programming language. Its informality means it requires less skill to master, but also means it may require more volume to achieve desired outcomes. At some level of granularity, it is necessarily the case that programming in english begins to look like programming in javascript; just with capital letters, exclamation points, and threats to fire the AI instead of asserts and conditionals. Are we really saving time, and thus generating higher levels of productivity? Or, is its true benefit that it enables foray into languages and domains you might be unfamiliar with; unlocking software development for a wider range of people who couldn't muster it before? Its probably a bit of both.

Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening. I would put money on even $100M not happening, barring some level of hyperinflation which changes our established understanding of what a dollar even is. But, here's what I will say: hitting levels of revenue like this, with a human count so low that the input of the AI has to overwhelm the input from the humans, is the only way to prove to me that, actually, these things might be more than freakin awesome tools. Blog posts from people making greenfield apps named after a furrsona DJ isn't moving the needle for me on this issue.

[1] https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-pr...

> Dario Amodei says we'll have the first billion dollar solo-company by 2026 [1]. I lean toward this not happening.

Why not? Not like companies have to actually do anything beyond marketing to get insane evaluations… remember theranos?

Theranos peaked at ~800 employees, FYI.

Reason 1: Because any company with one individual who leverages AI to achieve a billion dollar valuation would trivially & obviously be more valuable and be able to achieve more if they had two people leveraging AI. And, at a billion dollar valuation; why not pay that extra salary? Why not add a third? There's a huge difference in potential output by building with a founder team of 2 or 3 people versus 1; with not that much difference in cost.

Reason 2: The most capital efficient valuations in history are B2C companies (Instagram & Whatsapp are maybe the two best examples) during the VC boom era of the 2010s. B2C is naturally very capital efficient; you can do inbound marketing, no sales teams, just build. But, B2C success stories are more-and-more rare; the name of the game in the 2020s era has generally been B2B. Cursor might be the fastest company to reach $500M in revenue, and it got there on B2B, Notion isn't building its AI tools to sell to its consumer customers, etc. B2B is a lot harder; it requires outbound marketing & sales, as well as customer-led product development that usually requires interacting with people. AI will absorb some of those roles, but to suggest it can widdle down to one person per billion dollars in valuation in a year feels too accelerated to me. The world is complex, old, and crusty.

Just look at the YC batches for 2025 [1]: Of the 375 companies in the three batches, 20 are Consumer tech (~5%).

Reason 3: Weaker, but something I think about: AI is weirdly non-differentiating/egalitarian. You see some people try to differentiate it with crazy prompts or context engineering, but then next month Cursor ships an update and suddenly those aren't differentiating anymore. If you're an investor in a single-person unicorn-moonshot, you have to ask: Why can't some other company just come in and do the same thing you're doing? If that much can be automated through off-the-shelf systems. My feeling is that this concern would lead to lower revenue multiples on the valuation, which just makes it that much harder to hit unicorn status.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202025&ba...

AI is still in an experimental phase for many teams, especially when it comes to handling complex, long-term projects. For PMs and EMs, the cost-benefit analysis of AI credits vs. manual tasks is a big concern before fully committing to AI adoption. Some teams have seen great success, particularly in areas where speed and flexibility are key, but others are still waiting for clearer ROI before diving in. It’ll be interesting to see how the balance of risk and reward evolves as AI tools mature.