Lenny Rachitsky on Building Without Code

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Tech Department of One

Lenny Rachitsky on Building Without Code

Lenny Rachitsky built one of the most influential newsletters in tech. The week we spoke, he'd also shipped a soundboard of his son's voice for his wife and a website that scrapes images out of Google Docs. Here's the playbook he says any non-tech operator can run this weekend.

By Bruce<br>&middot; May 22, 2026

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Lenny Rachitsky

Lenny's Newsletter

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Lenny Rachitsky writes Lenny's Newsletter , which has over one million subscribers, and hosts Lenny's Podcast . Before that he spent seven years inside Airbnb on supply growth, conversion, trip quality, and community.<br>The week we spoke, he'd shipped two things on the side. One was a soundboard of his son's cute little sounds, built for his wife. The other was a small website that pulls images out of a Google Doc and downloads them as a zip file.<br>He didn't write a line of code for either.<br>This is the inaugural episode of Tech Department of One, a Bruce series about non-tech operators using AI to build what used to require a development team. The most interesting voices on AI right now aren't the ones inside tech. They're the operators outside it.

1M+

Subscribers to the newsletter he started as a hobby on Medium

9 mo

He published weekly with no business plan before he tried a paywall. It worked.

2 apps

Side projects he shipped this week. No code involved.

Before the Paywall<br>Lenny didn't start the newsletter to build a business. He started it to get ideas out of his head.<br>"I started writing on Medium to crystallize my own learnings for my career. My first post ever did very well, and that felt really nice. I had more things I wanted to get out of my head, so I kept writing."<br>After six or seven posts, he moved to Substack. The decision he made next was the only one that ever mattered.<br>"I decided I'm gonna post once a week, to see how that goes. Create a little commitment to keep doing it."<br>For nine months he showed up. No paywall. No business plan. No expectation that any of it would amount to a career. Just one post a week, every week.<br>"After nine months, I realized I'd been doing it every week and still had a lot of ideas. I felt like, wow, this could actually be a thing."<br>That's the moment he tried a paywall on some of the posts. He didn't believe it would work. It worked. The newsletter became his career.<br>The reason this story matters here is the asymmetry. Nine months of grinding to find out if there was anything there. The platform was new. The tooling was minimal. The compounding ran on willpower.<br>What Lenny Built This Week<br>We didn't ask Lenny to walk us through his AI workflow. We asked him what he'd tell a non-tech founder who bumped into him at a coffee shop and said, Lenny, I've heard about all this AI stuff. What should I do this weekend?<br>He didn't reach for a course. He didn't reach for a productivity tip. He reached for two stories.<br>The first one was about his son. Lenny wanted to give his wife a soundboard of the cute little sounds their baby makes. The way he says blueberry. The way he says mama. He recorded them, dumped the WAV files into a folder on his desktop, and started.<br>"I had installed Claude Code, so I used it to break the file up into different snippets. Then I went to Lovable and asked it to create a soundboard. Here are the audio files. You just talk to it about what you want."<br>The second was a tool he built because he was annoyed.<br>"Once images are in a Google Doc, you can never get them out. So I just told Lovable, I wanna give you a Google Doc URL. Give me a website where I can enter the URL and download all the images into a zip file for me. And it built it."<br>He spent a weekend. He paid attention to two specific frictions in his life. He built two things. He's the same person who, on weekday mornings, runs one of the most influential newsletters in tech.<br>The Most Recent Unlock<br>When we asked Lenny for an example of someone whose skills had been unlocked by AI, he didn't reach for a famous case. He reached for a podcast he'd recorded that very morning, with Dan Shipper, the founder of Every. Dan doesn't know how to code.<br>Until recently.<br>"He built a sophisticated product on his own with Codex. He doesn't know how to code. He hires engineers and works with engineers, but hasn't shipped his own product on his own before. He's able to do that now without ever knowing anything about how the code works. He's such an interesting, product-minded person. It's clear that it unlocks a lot for him."

The unlock isn't engineers getting faster. It's people who were never going to be engineers shipping the things only they could imagine.

The Lenny Playbook<br>Here's the actual playbook he gave us, in his words and his order:<br>Think of a problem, or something annoying in your life, or something that would be delightful for your partner, your family, or your kids.<br>Open Lovable.<br>Describe what you...