Pieter Levels just had Claude Code build a GTA: San Andreas mission where CJ vibe codes a startup and then pitches investors in SF. It plays like a joke, and it also describes his actual life.
@levelsio runs a portfolio that makes over $3M a year, and the whole team is him.
The story starts in 2014. He was 27, living out of hotel rooms in Asia and making about $500 a month. His dad told him that when you feel low, you grab a shovel and start shoveling. So he launched 12 Startups in 12 Months, one product every month, each with a Stripe checkout button.
A few of them stuck. Nomad List got to $700K ARR. Remote OK passed $3.4M in revenue. Photo AI reached $600K ARR. Those are the numbers John Collison read back to him on Cheeky Pint in July 2025.
On February 2, 2025, @karpathy posted about a new kind of coding he called "vibe coding," where you "forget that the code even exists." Collins Dictionary later made it its 2025 Word of the Year.
Twenty days later, Levels started building a flight simulator in the browser with Cursor and Three.js, live on X. The first playable version took about three hours. It was his first game.
http://fly.pieter.com hit $1M ARR in 17 days. In his day 10 update, $38,000 of the $38,360 in monthly revenue came from brands buying ad blimps inside the game, and he said he'd keep doubling the ad price as buyers lined up.
That's the part founders should study. The afternoon of code sat on top of ten years of building an audience in public, and that audience is who bought the blimps.
Look at one of the first big vibe coding exits. Wix paid about $80M in cash for Base44, a vibe coding platform that was around six months old. The large checks keep going to the tools people build with.
For solo builders, the edge sits upstream of the code. Levels already owns the distribution and the payment links, so every new model makes him faster at the one thing he's been doing since 2014: ship something tonight and see if anyone pays for it tomorrow.
That's why the GTA clip lands. CJ has the product done before the meeting starts.
He should probably ask Pieter for the intro.
来源：Ruben · x.com