Jason M. Lemkin built three AI apps using Lovable and Claude without writing code, then handed them to colleague Amelia to run daily. He notes the overlooked problem: someone still needs to maintain these apps and fix the bugs that pop up in production.
The first one I wanted to hit, talk about, and then get a lot of Amelia's thoughts on, and which is, okay, now you can build it, but who maintains it? Now you can build it, who maintains it? So if you've been following our agent journey since this last summer on the leading vibe code platforms, and we love them, we love Replit, we love Lovable, we love Vercel v0, they're all exciting. You know, at first when I started, it was tough to get an application out the door that worked in so-called into production. And I struggled at first even Even having co-founded a SaaS company that went from $0 to $200 million in revenue, I still struggled. As 2025 went on, the platforms got better, the models got better. It got easier and easier. And then toward the end of last year, it got great. And if you're not a developer, but you're on social media or you talk to your own teams, you'll see everything kind of exploded when Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.5 came out in December or so of last year. Productivity exploded everywhere. Everything, it was just magical. You can see it because Anthropic went from $9 billion to $30 billion in revenue already this year. It exploded the quality. But even if you're not a developer, if you're using Replit, Lovable, Vercel, VCR, and others, you're benefiting from those models because they got better. And so what happened now is it's not that you can magically in one prompt build your own CRM in 5 seconds. Like that was always marketing over reality. but now you really can finish your apps. And I kind of handed the baton to Amelia at the end of last year. I built, rebuilt Saastr AI. I started our new Saastr annual website. I built our AI valuation calculator for startups that have used a million. I did all that and kind of struggled and went through the bumps. Amelia took over probably in January. Amelia with the— took over. Yeah. And built our AI VP of marketing on her own, which is very, very good. And then our AI VP of customer success, QB, which is even better. So we're gonna talk about 10K and QB like every week, all the bumps we have because they're part of our team. They check in with our Slack every day. They are part of our team. And so you'll hear us, but my, my slightly long setup is now if you are persistent, you can build a lot of B2B and AI apps in these vibe-coded apps without an engineer. You really can, you really can get them out for real. And the meta question is who maintains them? And this is what is underdiscussed. And I want to talk about 3 things, uh, that have happened this week for us.
