The people who can't code are building the future anyway

From an Ethiopian AI platform with 85,000 users to an $80 million solo exit, the most interesting software stories of 2025 came from people who never learned to code

Andrej Karpathy typed a tweet on 2 February 2025 and accidentally named a movement. “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’,” he wrote, “where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Within weeks the phrase had its own Wikipedia article in 33 languages¹. By year’s end, Collins Dictionary named it their Word of the Year. J.P. Morgan published a formal guide. And in Addis Ababa, Lagos, Dubai, Singapore, and a dozen other cities where the phrase had never been heard, people who had never written a line of code were already doing the thing Karpathy described. They were building software for problems no venture-backed startup had bothered to notice.