Don’t Let AI Fool You — Here’s Why Every Founder Still Needs to Learn to Code

Say you’re renovating your kitchen, and you’ve got it all figured out, down to the model of the ventilation hood and the exact shade of the countertop granite. You can see the whole thing in your mind: the great meals you’ll cook on your top-of-the-line range; the way you’ll pull wine glasses for friends out of the handcrafted cabinets (which, by the way, bring out the earth tones in the backsplash). It’s going to be perfect.

Except for one, tiny detail: You’ve never renovated a kitchen. And you have no idea where to start.

Sure, you can hire contractors and designers to handle every step. But without even a basic grasp of carpentry or design, you’ll be in the dark. You won’t know whether their timeline is realistic or how to gauge whether the materials they’re proposing are worth the cost. With even a baseline amount of knowledge, the entire process would run a whole lot smoother.

These days, there’s a growing belief that you don’t need to be tech-savvy to launch a product. With AI at your side, the thinking goes, you can take a business from idea to execution without ever writing a single line of code.

While I agree that AI is making it easier than ever to start a business, I still think there’s value in understanding the nuts and bolts of coding. Just as a homeowner wants to be able to identify poorly installed drywall if they see it, every business owner should have a grasp of what’s going on under the hood of the technology on which their product relies. Here’s why.

Related: AI Is Changing How We Start Businesses — Here’s What You Need to Know

You can build your MVP quickly

When I advise future founders on their ideas, one thing I always tell them is that they should be able to build their own minimum viable product, or MVP. Bootstrappers in particular don’t have extra cash to fork over to developers before they even have a sense of whether their idea has legs.

A great, recent example of the power of a quick-and-dirty MVP is the vibe coding company Base44, launched by software developer and entrepreneur Maor Shlomo with the help of AI. Shlomo was already a successful engineer when the idea for Base44 came to him; AI simply allowed him to build it on his own. Within weeks, Base44 had attracted more than 100,000 users. By mid-2025, the product was profitable and acquired by Wix for roughly $80 million.

The lesson here isn’t that every founder needs to become a senior software engineer. It’s that having enough coding knowledge to tinker, test and stitch together the first version of your product gives you an enormous advantage. You don’t have to wait for someone else to validate your idea — you can do it yourself, quickly and with far less overhead.

You can manage your programmers better

Just as basic carpentry skills can help you determine whether those cabinets were installed correctly, a working knowledge of code helps you understand what your developers are building. This isn’t to say you need to understand every detail, but you do need enough fluency to ask the right questions.

It also makes hiring easier when you know what skills you’re looking for. Without a baseline, you risk making an uninformed decision based more on trust and intuition than on the certainty that a candidate knows their stuff. Trust may be essential on any team, but it’s not the same as oversight. Founders who can’t tell the difference between elegant, scalable code and a quick patch job are more likely to end up with products that are brittle, expensive to maintain or riddled with security holes.

As a proud bootstrapper, I’d add that wearing several hats — coding being one, but also marketing, customer support, UX writing, etc. — is beneficial in the same way. It took me a long time to make my first hire, but when the time finally came, I knew exactly what I wanted in an employee — knowledge I would have lacked had I simply outsourced those jobs from the start. When you’ve spent time in the weeds yourself, you can quickly separate candidates who are talking a good game from those who can truly deliver.

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Learning to code has never been easier

I studied computer science in college, but formal education is in no way a prerequisite for learning to code — especially these days. Some of the best-known founders, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, taught themselves to code; a handful of others learned just enough to get their products off the ground.

And the barrier to entry has dropped even further. Today, AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT and Replit’s Ghostwriter can suggest code, explain errors and walk you through debugging in real time. What used to take hours of scouring Stack Overflow can now be solved in minutes with an AI coding partner. That doesn’t mean you can skip learning altogether, but it does mean the path to fluency is far less intimidating than it once was.

For founders, that’s the real opportunity. You don’t need to be the world’s best engineer. You just need to know enough. Because when you understand even the basics, you’re not just dreaming up the kitchen — you’re building it on your own terms.

Say you’re renovating your kitchen, and you’ve got it all figured out, down to the model of the ventilation hood and the exact shade of the countertop granite. You can see the whole thing in your mind: the great meals you’ll cook on your top-of-the-line range; the way you’ll pull wine glasses for friends out of the handcrafted cabinets (which, by the way, bring out the earth tones in the backsplash). It’s going to be perfect.

Except for one, tiny detail: You’ve never renovated a kitchen. And you have no idea where to start.