Pieter Levels

Pieter Levels, known online as levelsio, is a Dutch programmer and the patron saint of the one-person internet business. Working solo from his laptop — famously in vanilla PHP with a single SQLite file, no frameworks and no employees — he built Nomad List, Remote OK, and a string of other products in public, tweeting his revenue dashboards along the way. His products collectively generate millions of dollars a year.

The one-person AI company

Levels was early to generative AI as a business: in 2022–2023 he launched Interior AI and Photo AI, wiring image models into simple products; Photo AI, an AI photoshoot generator pitched as “fire your photographer,” grew past $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue. On Lex Fridman’s podcast in 2024 he laid out the method — ship fast, charge money, let the models do what once required a studio — and became the reference case for AI-era solo founders.

Then came the stunt that defined vibe coding for the mainstream. On February 22, 2025 — three weeks after Andrej Karpathy coined the term — Levels tweeted that he had built a browser flight simulator entirely with Cursor in about three hours, never having made a game before. He admitted it went about “80%” smoothly, requiring rollbacks and repeated prompts, but fly.pieter.com went viral, drew Elon Musk’s attention, and Levels monetized it in real time with in-game ads and jet sales — later writing that it reached a $1 million annual run rate within 17 days.

Skeptics point out that his reach (over half a million X followers) did as much as the AI, and that a one-file game is not production software. Levels largely agrees — his own framing is that AI collapses the distance between an idea and a shipped product for anyone willing to iterate in public.