Jason M. Lemkin describes how AI agents went from building mock-ups to creating fully functional apps. Opus 4.5 in December changed everything: his team member Amelia built an autonomous AI VP of Marketing that runs daily in production. A startup raised $50 million with its entire website built by Lovable.
Radically. Can you help me understand why, Jason? Because I actually don't know. Because what changed in December— what— so like, listen, I've been on Replit— not to talk about forever about Replit and Lovable— but I've been on it since June. And when I started, you couldn't finish anything. You'd ask Replit or Lovable to build an app. You remember in the early days, Harry, and you'd get a lot of buttons that didn't work. Okay. Nothing worked. They'd be fake buttons. Everything was fake. Right. And then, oh, then it got better and better. And then by December, especially with Opus 4.5, all of a sudden it could fit. It wasn't just you could have a code for hours, whatever. That doesn't really matter for a lot of use cases. It could finish apps that worked, like really worked, right? And then on our team, Amelia took it over and she built an entire AI VP of marketing that is better than anything on the market. And she finished it without any drama. Like it took work, but she just completed it. It's in production every day doing all of our marketing, not just execution, but it has all the ideas. It's like Hal, it wakes up every morning and tells us what to do with data. It's a little freaky. And one of the reasons was, one of the many reasons was these multiple agents running in swarm and working on the software together. An architect, a security expert, a backend expert, a database expert. And Replit just did one thing early, which is, and maybe Cursor did this too, they built a framework so you could use these multiple agents together efficiently before you could in cloud, right? You could do it earlier. And so now that someone that's just very smart can birth an AI BPM that marketing literally works, In 6 months, the applications we'll be able to build, our jaws will just drop. Will just, will just drop. And already I don't even know what to do with Demo Day. We literally got a sponsor that, that just raised $50 million. Their website was all built in Lovable. We just, we were just laughing about it, but maybe that's not funny anymore. Maybe these apps are so good.
