Pieter Levels on Vibecoding and the Future of Indie Hackers

The builder who ran out of ideas before he ran out of time

Pieter Levels, the indie maker best known as @levelsio, has built his reputation on shipping fast. He founded Nomad List, a site for the growing population of travelling remote workers, or digital nomads. It helps them choose where to live by filtering on preferences such as internet speed, cost of living, weather and safety, drawing on thousands of data points in total. 1 His personal site also highlights a broader catalogue of side projects and his early "12 Startups in 12 Months" challenge. That challenge became a template for a generation of solo founders. 1

His recent public commentary suggests something has shifted. One of his more striking observations is that it now feels strange to be able to build things faster than he can come up with new ideas. 2 For someone whose brand rests on rapid execution, that is a notable admission. It implies the bottleneck in his work has moved from building to imagining.

Vibecoding as everyday practice

A run of posts collected on his site traces how deeply AI-assisted coding has entered his workflow. Levels says he cancelled all of his SaaS subscriptions and "vibecoded" replacements for every one of them himself. 2 He also describes building infiniteslop.ai in a single day, entirely from his phone. He used Termius to connect to a Hetzner VPS running Claude Code, and he did it while sitting in a sauna. 2 Another post notes that AI video can now be generated faster than a person can watch it. 2

None of this is new territory for him. Back in August 2020, he wrote about building a startup idea generator with GPT-3. 2 That project is an early marker of his interest in using language models to speed up the creative side of founding companies. Read alongside his recent comment about building outpacing ideas, there is an irony here. Years ago he used AI to produce ideas, and now AI-driven execution is outrunning his supply of them.

The uncomfortable conclusion for indie hackers

The more consequential thread is what Levels thinks this means for people like him. He argues that AI improves the quality of everyone's apps. It also means customers can now vibecode their own clones rather than pay for a product. 2 Taken to its logical end, he suggests indie hackers could be the first kind of developer to go extinct, because AI drives down the cost of execution. 2

He pushes the point further in a post claiming that a Y Combinator batch consisted only of "harness" or hardware startups, leading him to say software is "mostly dead." 2 That is a characteristically blunt claim. It is best read as provocation rather than a measured market analysis, since the post titles alone don't show the underlying data. Still, the argument hangs together. If his own SaaS spending can drop to zero because he can rebuild the tools himself, then other technically capable customers can do the same.

Beyond code: a wider political voice

Levels' feed is not only about software. Recent posts include a call to use certain data to "completely turn around" Europe's immigration policy. 2 He also argues that criticism of Dubai largely reflects European frustration with conditions in its own cities, and warns that regulatory capture could "speedrun" society toward a new feudalism. 2 Another references a "Come and Take It" flag featuring a GPU and a rattlesnake. 2 These positions are contested, and the post titles offer conclusions without the evidence behind them. They do show that his audience gets a mix of technical demos and pointed social commentary. That fits the ethos of a founder whose flagship product is about choosing where to live based on safety, cost and quality of life. 1

Reading the signal

The two sides of Levels' online presence point in one direction. His long-standing profile casts him as the archetypal indie maker who turned remote-work data into a business. 1 His recent posts suggest he believes the economic foundation of that model is eroding. 2 The tools that let him ship a site from a sauna are the same tools that let would-be customers skip his paywall.

The sensible reading is that execution is becoming cheap, not that software is literally dying. When execution is cheap, value shifts to things that are harder to clone. Distribution, accumulated data, audience and taste all fall into that category. Nomad List's thousands of data points and Levels' own large following are examples of exactly those assets. 1

If indie hacking survives, it will probably look less like building clever utilities and more like owning something an AI-equipped customer can't simply regenerate. Levels running short of ideas may be the clearest sign of where the scarce resource now lies.