Adaptive Computer wants to reinvent the PC with ‘vibe’ coding for non-programmers

Summary

Dennis Xu is a repeat tech startup founder, but he’s the first to admit he’s not a programmer. After co-founding AI note-taking app Mem — one of OpenAI’s earliest venture investments — he has now launched a new startup called Adaptive Computer. Its grandiose mission is nothing less than a complete reimagining of personal computer software. He wants non-programmers to be using full-featured apps that they’ve created themselves, simply by entering a text prompt into Adaptive’s no-code web-app platform. To make that happen, Xu and co-founder Mike Soylu just announced a $7 million seed round, led by Pebblebed with participation from Conviction, Weekend Fund, Jake Paul’s Anti-fund, Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki, and others. (Pebblebed is a relatively new seed fund founded by Pamela Vagata, an AI engineer formerly of Stripe, and Keith Adams, former chief architect at Slack.) Prior to LLMs, Xu said he had to work with designers, who worked with the engineers “basically influencing people” to build the things he envisioned. (He left Mem in 2023.) But now, “we’d be able to put something in every person’s pocket where they could actually build the personal computer of their dreams,” as he describes it. To be certain, this isn’t about the computer itself or any hardware — despite the company’s name. The startup currently only builds web apps. However, for every app it builds, Adaptive Computer’s engine handles creating a database instance, user authentication, file management, and can create apps that include payments (via Stripe), scheduled tasks, and AI features such as image generation, speech synthesis, content analysis, and web search/research. In demoing its product, called ac1, which is still in “alpha mode” (meaning it’s got limited features and functionality), I gave it a text prompt asking for a bicycle ride log app. A minute later, it built a JavaScript-based app, complete with back-end database, with no further configuration needed on my part. While this app didn’t inte...