Andreessen Horowitz

Guido Appenzeller and Yoko Li valued the AI software development market above a trillion dollars in October 2025, and their argument runs through most of what Andreessen Horowitz says about code: AI-assisted tooling can double developer productivity, the number of developers does not fall, and the software market expands instead, because more ideas reach a working product faster. The firm's word for the resulting role is conductor. Marc Andreessen, who co-founded a16z, describes the day-to-day version: orchestrating ten coding bots in parallel, arguing with them, debugging their output, and pushing specifications until the result is right.

The same optimism shows up in the consumer data. The fifth edition of the Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps, built on 2.5 years of measurement, found vibe coding platforms such as Lovable and Replit holding strong retention rather than fading, Gemini taking second place behind ChatGPT on both web visits and mobile actives, and 14 "All-Star" companies present in the web top 50 across all five editions.

Matthew Connelly, vice dean for AI initiatives at Columbia University, reads the firm from the other side. Writing in the New York Times, he notes that Roy Lee, a Columbia student, built an AI tool to cheat at job interviews, and that a16z admired his bold approach and raised $15 million for his company Cluely, whose manifesto declares an intent to cheat on everything.