Bitcoins <\/p>\n
Dennis Xu is a repeat tech startup founder, but he\u2019s the first to admit he\u2019s not a programmer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After co-founding AI note-taking app Mem \u2014 one of OpenAI\u2019s earliest venture investments<\/a> \u2014 he has now launched a new startup called Adaptive Computer<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Its grandiose mission is nothing less than a complete reimagining of personal computer software. He wants non-programmers to be using full-featured apps that they\u2019ve created themselves, simply by entering a text prompt into Adaptive\u2019s no-code web-app platform.<\/p>\n To make that happen, Xu and co-founder Mike Soylu just announced a $7 million seed round, led by Pebblebed with participation from Conviction, Weekend Fund, Jake Paul\u2019s Anti Fund, Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki, and others. (Pebblebed is a relatively new seed fund founded by Pamela Vagata, an AI engineer formerly of Stripe, and Keith Adams, former chief architect at Slack.)<\/p>\n Prior to LLMs, Xu said he had to work with designers, who worked with the engineers \u201cbasically influencing people\u201d to build the things he envisioned. (He left Mem in 2023.)<\/p>\n But now, \u201cwe\u2019d be able to put something in every person\u2019s pocket where they could actually build the personal computer of their dreams,\u201d as he describes it.<\/p>\n To be certain, this isn\u2019t about the computer itself or any hardware \u2014 despite the company\u2019s name. The startup currently only builds web apps.<\/p>\n However, for every app it builds, Adaptive Computer\u2019s engine handles creating a database instance, user authentication, file management, and can create apps that include payments (via Stripe), scheduled tasks, and AI features such as image generation, speech synthesis, content analysis, and web search\/research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In demoing its product, called ac1, which is still in \u201calpha mode\u201d (meaning it has limited features and functionality), I gave it a text prompt asking for a bicycle ride log app. A minute later, it built a JavaScript-based app<\/a>, complete with back-end database, with no further configuration needed on my part.<\/p>\n While this app didn\u2019t integrate with third-party services like my fitness watch, it did automatically add features like sorting rides, tallying total distance, and comparing rides. This was also a fully functional website, not a prototype, that could be shared with others to log their own rides, without sharing my personal data.\u00a0<\/p>\n As interesting as this idea is, Adaptive Computer is hardly the first and only \u201cvibe coding\u201d platform out there, meaning writing code based on text prompts.\u00a0<\/p>\n Competitor Replit claims to have over 30 million users<\/a> and has begun to cater to non-programmers so heavily that its founder CEO, Amjad Masad, caused outrage by declaring on X last month.<\/a> \u201cI no longer think you should learn to code.\u201d<\/p>\nFor true non-programmers<\/h2>\n