AI makes it tempting to vibe-code your startup yourself. Learn when you still need a technical cofounder, what traits to look for, and how to pay them.
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I think this is the part that gets missed when people say you don’t need a technical co-founder anymore because of Claude Code. I agree to an extent. For building V1? Sure, you probably don’t need one. Even for getting your first 20–30 customers, you might be able to get pretty far without one.
But eventually, there’s a point where you genuinely need someone technical, and I think that point depends heavily on the industry you’re building in.
I work in the attribution space, and there’s just no way I believe Claude can build and maintain an attribution platform as reliably as a strong human engineer can. Once you’re dealing with 5, 10, 15 different systems all interacting with each other — Meta, Google, attribution, postbacks, APIs, SDKs, etc., things get complicated very quickly.
AI coding agents are insanely good at building things, but when you have to maintain the intersection of a bunch of systems reliably over a long period of time, I still think you need a really strong technical person who understands what’s happening underneath it all.
That’s where I think a technical co-founder becomes really important.
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