Riley Brown

Riley Brown is a content creator turned founder who became one of the loudest popularizers of “vibe coding” — the practice, named by Andrej Karpathy, of building software by describing it to an AI in natural language rather than writing code by hand. He co-founded Vibecode, a startup that raised roughly $9 million to let people generate mobile apps from text prompts on their phones.

From 30 million developers to a billion builders

Brown’s pitch is democratization: where traditional programming demands years of study, he argues AI lets anyone convert an idea into a working app in minutes. He frames vibe coding as expanding software creation from the world’s ~30 million professional developers to hundreds of millions — and eventually a billion — “builders.” His tutorials walk complete beginners through shipping real projects with tools like Cursor.

That optimism about access places him squarely in the pro-AI camp, and among the most visible faces of the vibe-coding movement. Critics note that AI-generated code can hide fragility and security holes beneath a working surface, a caution echoed even by fellow AI-forward developers like Theo Browne.