Pieter Levels
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs his internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
Pieter Levels did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter All topics · Newest first
Topic
50 more topics
Anthropic 5capitalism 5health and fitness 5LLMs 5immigration 4social media 4chat interfaces 3coding agents 3management 3politics 3self-driving cars 3simplicity 3taste 3AI alignment 2AI and jobs 2ambition 2behavioural science 2benchmarks 2censorship 2friendship 2ideas vs execution 2investing 2Japan 2open source 2team size 2the cloud 2agency 1AI slop 1America 1Apple 1aviation 1degrowth 1design 1developer tools 1electric vehicles 1Google 1happiness 1housing 1JavaScript 1MCP 1motivation 1OpenAI 1personal websites 1product management 1remote work 1robotics 1semiconductors 1Silicon Valley 1stock market 1venture capital 1
-
Their wordsPerfumes disrupt you and other people's endocrine system, destroys the chemical messenger system of pheromones (used to smell who can be a good love partner for you), and many other bad things
-
Their wordsI am actively looking at buying more land and real estate (especially coastal) as that's a scarce asset that will remain scarce post-AGI
↗I'm scrambling to chase any remaining moats as AI companies suck up everything elselevels.io
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsIt's inevitable and Marx was right in this sense, capitalism will eat itself on a long enough time span
-
Their wordsData brokers are now buying up SaaS data sets for anywhere from $100K to $2M SaaS are struggling now and some extra money to fill the gap by declining revenues is nice That data is then re-sold to AI training companies and AI frontier labs for the exact purpose of integrating whatever that SaaS did into the AI frontier lab's app
-
Their wordsAGI-assisted automation will finally provide us with consistent quality services like the one below
-
Their wordsI think they'd be smart banning eco/degrowth next, as they're the exact same thing with the exact same end goal
- 1 day earlier
-
Our reading
Software engineers are in a state of denial regarding the impact of AI on their profession.
Their wordsGenerational level of cope going on right now by software engineers that AI has not affected them, is not affecting them, and will not ever affect them
-
Their wordsMost tech people are in their own bubble thinking we're the only ones who use AI
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsWesterners keep having lower standards every year and don't notice the declining quality of everything around them
-
Our reading
The Dead Internet Theory could become a reality if AI replaces all human content creation
Their wordsThe Dead Internet Theory could become real if AI replaces all human content creation
-
Our reading
Their wordsThis week we talk a lot about moats, and data is a moat, and Nomads has a lot of data that I can get paid for, so that's a good direction to move into
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsYou can get very rich on helping IRL businesses with the transition to AI and automating everything for them
-
Their wordsOne of the repeated misconceptions I see is that people think I mean people will ask AI agents to build software, but I don't, their AI agents will solve their problems by building software on the fly With that a market springs up of software/data/etc for AI agents to pay for and connect to (like with MCP/APIs)
-
Their wordsThey'll have to to stay competitive because if one adapts AI, they all have to!
-
Their wordsthere's an explosion of creativity if anyone can make their own personal software
-
Their wordsThere's ~40 million software developers in the world There's 2 billion people regularly using AI tools now So that's 50x, it'll grow to the same number as internet access, that's 6 billion people, so 200x more AI users than devs
-
Their wordsI'd expand the moats left to: Proprietary data or content: data nobody else has, or unique content you can create Network effects / community: users make it more valuable for each other Audience / distribution: you can get attention on demand Physical component: hardware, locations, real-world operations Capital: owning assets and investing (esp into the AI companies as they are and will suck up large parts of the economy) Regulatory: licenses and legal barriers
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsPersonal software that removes reliance on paid SaaS subscriptions and lets you create a malleable, user-controlled computing environment
-
Their wordsAI agents can easily maintain their own software projects and already do (see OpenClaw etc)
-
Their wordsMake those 10 years like 1-2 year now because AI moves exponentially fast and normies adopt it quite fast because the interface is so easy (a chat)
-
Their wordsBut AI agents too will try find the lowest price or do it for free if they can, they have a strong economic incentive not to spend their user's money!
-
Our reading
Non-technical people are already spinning up personal software, whatever tech people think.
Their wordsTech people somehow still think normies are not spinning up personal software already
-
Their wordsThat's why you're seeing an AI-assisted explosion of creativity
-
Our reading
People will stop using most regular software because AI agents will build software for them.
Their wordsThey won't know they're building software because their AI app/agent will do it for them And then they'll stop using most regular software!
-
Their wordsNormies won't ask "build me software" They will ask "I have this photo and I want to manually edit it" and it will spin up a Photoshop clone They will ask "I need to know if sales are going up or down this quarter from all different ecommerce platforms we use" and it will spin up an analytics dashboard connecting all APIs with scheduled crons that keeps it up to date forever
-
Their wordsif "we're not there yet" is someone's business thesis They get rekt with AI's exponential progress faster than they think
-
Their wordsIn transitionary times, it's better to spot the big waves early and adapt, than try ignore it, fight it, because you can't fight nature
-
Their wordsSome software moats will remain like social media (community), ecommerce (think like Shopify and Stripe), etc but they will just be used by AI to build the personal software with
-
Their wordsNo one has the time to actively maintain software especially for non technical people
-
Their wordsIt's now the era of personal software and everyone just builds what they need whenever they need it I think