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by colecut 469 days ago
That has been a pretty wild development to watch..

I've been following him for a while, it's interesting what a polarizing figure he is..

a recent comment on his X feed resonated with quite a few people

"I’ve never seen an account that feels inspirational and makes me want to kill myself simultaneously"

He is definitely an entrepreneur/business man first and a developer second.. He has taught himself the skills to minimally get the job done functionally, has decent eye for design, and knows how to market... He makes it blatantly obvious, moreso than usual, that sales and marketing are way more important to making money than doing things technically "the right way".. At least on these smaller scale things because he only knows how to work by himself.

People hate that he's figured out how to make tens of thousands of dollars from a game that is arguably worse than hundreds of games that make nothing... I see that as just another skill that can be learned. And it is cool how transparent he is about his operations.

But yes, even with his blueprints it is hard to replicate his successes, my attempt of "one shotting" a video game was not very impressive..

3 comments

He‘s basically jumping from hype to hype, riding the forefront wave of attention, funneling it into his wallet. I think he‘s extremely intelligent and quick also, both of which are necessary to do this. I wouldn’t be able to.
The last thing I saw him working on was AI generated people/avatars.

Yeah he was/is a big name for digital nomad, I used to quote his figured like $70K/mo I bet it's more now.

I think remotok is written in PHP and jQuery (example of makes money, tech is not fancy)

Yes, PhotoAI is his most successful thing now doing over $120k/ month on its own, it is also php and jquery.. cron jobs and AI apis..
HN people should take note with their overly architected weird latest tech setups that will never have any traffic; just make it work, worry about the rest later!
Amazing
The fact of the matter is, unless you're doing cutting edge work, you dont need to be a great programmer or "write good code" to be successful.

That's why it's mind blowing to me when devs say AI writes bad code. For the most part, who cares?

We, the people who used to write code, laboriously, by hand, using one's and zero's passed down to us, from Jacquard's loom, from before there was an Internet, do. A dying art, I suppose. Look at carpentry. The level of care put into the average kitchen cabinet evaporated when mass manufacturing means that Ikea can sell a set that is functional and looks just fine. Used to be, a carpenter painstakingly did it by hand, piece by piece in a woodshop. So too goes the way of coding, I suppose. Used to be every "if" "for" and "class" statement was typed out by a human, seen by human eyes. It seems that time must pass.
This is correct. Majority of software written is CRUD crap + a client. This doesn't require anything like "ideal" (or even particularly good) code

Exceptions are ofc for software where there's actual performance concerns, "important" stuff (banking, finance and the like). NextJS SAAS of the day ain't it.

I think it’s a little weird to say he made 10’s of thousands from a game and in curious if it will last. Is the game good? I logged into the game and just thought to myself, holy billboards Batman!

He made 10’s of thousands from advertising right? It feels like most of what the does the lesson is if you follow the steps I take you can be an entrepreneur too which is mostly true, with the game it feels like, if you develop a following of millions and then create something that leaps to the front of the hype train people may give you money for a while. Which doesn’t feel like what most people are hoping from “vibe coding a game can make you 60k/month.”

But no shade to him.

He is a very typical 'build in the open' guy (he is more famous and makes more than most of them but his strategy is typical); there are very many on x and bsky; they build and launch fast, many of them launch 10+ products/year to see what sticks and when money comes in, they use those buyers to launch yet more products. As long as the barrage of products makes enough as a whole, you just need to keep pushing more and more. It works; it will never be a unicorn but it gives Levels and others a nice life without much stress and you are accountable to no one and product fail doesn't matter.

I hate the term vibe coding, but as I understand it, it means just blabbering to cursor (or so) with working code as a result; he didn't do that as cursor (or replit or whatever current) cannot do that for more than hello world; if you do not read the generated code and specifically correct it when the ai gets stuck, it simply won't work. Levels can read and write code; people who want to 'vibe code' often cannot.

I agree on all of this. I don't think this will be a sustainable venture but that doesn't matter, 2 of these unsustainable businesses lasting 1 month each is my salary..

And agreed in the case of this game, the success is all because of his following. Not so with his other products though, this is just a joke to him..

And his game is technically better than anything I can put together