A Month on From Builder

It’s been almost a month since the news that Builder.ai was going into administration. Overnight, 500 incredibly talented people found themselves without jobs.

Since then, I’ve seen a lot of posts on LinkedIn — many supportive, some critical. A few have gone as far as to call Builder.ai a fraud, claiming there was no real AI, just a network of outsourced developers.

I want to set the record straight, based on what I saw from the inside.

Yes, we did use AI — extensively. Natasha, our conversational AI, helped customers define their app requirements and was probably the most visible part of our AI offering. But internally, AI played an even bigger role:

  • Auto-generating demo videos and prototypes
  • Estimating costs and timelines (including parallelising independent components)
  • Recommending staffing plans
  • Writing user stories, code, and tests
  • Reviewing code quality
  • Handling helpdesk queries

Builder.ai wasn’t just outsourcing — we were using AI to augment and accelerate how software was built. Our platform even matched customers with the most suitable partner developers to customize or extend reusable components, with AI guiding much of that process.

We were moving towards being AI-led rather than just AI-assisted — but unfortunately, time ran out before the vision could fully materialize.

500 people lost their jobs — and with them, a huge amount of skill, passion, and experience. If you’re hiring, know that some truly exceptional talent just became available.

  1. If you’re a Builder.ai customer worried about your code, please contact [email protected].
  2. There’s a good write up as to why probably wasn’t faked at The Pragmatic Engineer.
  3. Thanks to Federico Cargnelutti (ex-Builder) who reached out to Gergely Orosz and Mashable to correct the narrative.