AI turning software building into cultural arbitrage

thoughtpeddler1 pts0 comments

@levelsio (@levelsio): "This is super interesting

You now have non-tech normal people outship tech people in terms of reaching revenue fast

I have lots of techy software engineer friends and they have been trying for years to get any MRR for their sideprojects and they still haven't

Here's an Indonesian girl, who's tapped into TikTok culture, knows what to ship, can't even code but ships it fast thanks to AI and gets to $800 MRR in the first month

So we're officially in a new time now: it's now literally just a competition of being as tapped into the culture as possible, to then be able spot a trend and rapidly built and launch a site/app/biz around it, and make money

There is little to any benefit being in tech now over normal people, maybe even the opposite as tech people are very up to date on tech things but often quite out of date on many non-tech cultural trends

This is a great thing, but a bitter pill to swallow: another gatekeeper wiped out and every tech builder has to now stop putting effort into tech skills, and instead put effort into understanding culture trends to see what to build next

And build it fast!" | XCancel

@levelsio

@levelsio

May 23

This is super interesting

You now have non-tech normal people outship tech people in terms of reaching revenue fast

I have lots of techy software engineer friends and they have been trying for years to get any MRR for their sideprojects and they still haven't

Here's an Indonesian girl, who's tapped into TikTok culture, knows what to ship, can't even code but ships it fast thanks to AI and gets to $800 MRR in the first month

So we're officially in a new time now: it's now literally just a competition of being as tapped into the culture as possible, to then be able spot a trend and rapidly built and launch a site/app/biz around it, and make money

There is little to any benefit being in tech now over normal people, maybe even the opposite as tech people are very up to date on tech things but often quite out of date on many non-tech cultural trends

This is a great thing, but a bitter pill to swallow: another gatekeeper wiped out and every tech builder has to now stop putting effort into tech skills, and instead put effort into understanding culture trends to see what to build next

And build it fast!

Dominik Sobe ツ

@sobedominik

May 23

my girlfriend launched her first mobile app 5 weeks ago.

today it hit $800 MRR and almost $1000 in revenue!

incredibly proud boyfriend moment right here.

here’s the back story:

two months ago my gf approached me and asked me if i can teach her the basics of coding.

i was really stoked because it came from her and not me.

i tried forcing a partner in the past into coding and let me tell it didn’t work out well lol

anyways, being a proud engineer and believing in teaching people first principles i decided to not throw her immediately into AI vibe coding but rather teach her the basics of coding.

we started with the Swift playgrounds course which is absolutely amazing btw

after she learned programming primitives we moved to web and i taught her a bit of typescript

we then built a very simply react native app without any AI so she could get the feeling of how apps actually work (obsly very basic but better than nothing)

at that point my life became quite busy again and i had to fully focus on work

before that though, i taught her how AI works with Cursor and Claude Code and then i went back to work

fast forward a week or two my gf approached me with her first app idea that she wants to build

i genuinely couldn’t believe it because it was actually a great idea! very rare for a first timer.

she either absorbed a lot of business things i was just casually rambling during dinners or she’s just super smart.

probably the latter.

the idea had a few rough edges but i didn’t want to influence it too much because i believe that you gotta sometimes make mistakes and learn how to fix them / pivot along the way

so i basically “left the chat” and let her cook (or fu*k up) on her own

5 weeks later and her app revenue basically reached her salary (she’s indonesia and wages are a bit rekt)

95% of her revenue is coming from organic Tiktok clips and comments

every time i see her on her phone she’s now creating new content for distribution

i can see the hunger for more in her eyes and it’s absolutely beautiful

May 23, 2026 · 2:42 PM UTC

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Yekeen Ni

@aidevpreneur

3h

Replying to @levelsio

Can’t agree more, besides non tech distribution skills, the “tap into cultute” is another area of new skill tech builder needs to learn. I felt like the old fashioned reading/experiencing etc turns out still be really important

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James Q Quick

@jamesqquick

May 23

Replying to @levelsio

I’m really curious how realistic this is. I still feel like there’s a level of technical understanding to make decisions on architecture, debug, etc. super cool story!

1,061

Craig

@NiagaraThistle

May...

tech people fast levelsio culture first

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