Why 2026 Is the Year of the AI Builder with Lovable CEO Anton Osika

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, we are joined by lovable CEO, Anton Osika, to discuss the evolution of AI coding and why 2026 is the year of the builder. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Robots and Pencils, Blitzy and Superintelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe to Apple Podcasts. Ad-free is just three bucks a month. To learn more about sponsoring the show, or pretty much anything else about it, go to aidailybrief.ai. If you want to learn more about our recent benchmarking survey, you can get that information at aidbintel.com. And for today's episode, I'm excited to be joined by someone who has been about as deep in the vibe coding revolution as anyone can be. In this episode, we discuss everything from the earliest origins of what would become lovable back in 2023, which I actually covered in the first couple months of the show, to where the market was at the end of last year, to how what people are doing with vibe coding has changed over the course of 2025, to what Anton thinks is coming in 2026 All right, Anton, welcome to the AI Daily Brief. How are you doing?

**Anton Osika** (1:12)
Great to see you, Nathaniel.

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (1:13)
Yeah, it's great to have you here. So as I was just sharing, this conversation is part of this series of end of year episodes that are a little bit about looking back and a little bit about looking forward. And for me, undisputedly, the most important kind of AI theme of the last year has been the rise of vibe coding, AI coding, agenda coding, whatever you want to call it, AI assisted coding. And I think it's poised to be extremely important heading into next year as well. And I was actually looking back because so I started this show in April of 2023 And I remembered very early on doing a show or I thought I had done a show about GPT engineer.
And sure enough, I just went back and looked and it was July 19th, 2023 that I did the first show covering that. And so obviously you've been on this journey for a minute. And I kind of wanted to talk about clearly the idea of using AI to produce real functional code is something that you got interested in very early. But what was the sort of journey from those earliest experiments and people on GitHub getting super excited about GPT engineer up to kind of when lovable became a thing towards the end of last year?

**Anton Osika** (2:18)
Yes, it's been a wonderful year, 2025, I have to say. And I think we're still just getting started. And the coming months and years are going to be about scaling the impact you have when you create something with AI. And going back to right before lovable was even an idea. To me, it was clear in 2022 that we would see this model just getting smarter and smarter. And in 2023, they started being able to reason. So what I had been doing is just showing people, look, these things can actually reason. So that means you can give them a task and then they break it down. And they're especially pretty good at coding. And it's going to completely change how we create software. And back then, people were super skeptical. They were like, no, no, it's AI, AI is stupid. So the tool that I put together over a few weekends was this open source command line interface. It's like similar to Cloud Code, but it was in spring of 2023, where I recorded a video, Create Me a Snake Game, and it went out and I wrote all the files for the snake game and then started it on my computer. And from there, that got super popular. I think that inspired like dozens or hundreds of startups, to even start in the first place, before Loveable. And what I started thinking about was, hey, what's the bigger implication of this? Is it the implication that we as developers are going to have more tools to move faster? Yes, that's one implication. But the one that caught my attention after a few days of thinking about this was, look, the bigger change is, it's going to change who can create software.
And for me as a builder, it's very clear that just being able to create software, like shape some, take an idea and shape it into something that you can interact with, is like super rewarding. So that's when I decided I'm going to start a company, it's going to reimagine like what tools we use, what the interface is to create software. And when I realized this, I went on my bicycle and I biked over to Fabian, my co-founder's place now, and I called him up and I said, hey look Fabian, we're going to change how software is created and who gets to create it. And we took a walk and decided to start the company. So that's the backstory. And then since then, as you know, if you're building an AI product, there's a lot of hard work that goes into making it not just be a cool demo, but actually really create a lot of value and be as reliable as it can be. And that's what we've been at hard at work with since then, and just listening to what our users are using Level 4 and how can we improve the tool.