By Katherine Bindley
SAN FRANCISCO -- During the tech boom of the 2010s, coding teams here spent months building apps that changed the way we live.
Now, that's just a Saturday night for an 11-year-old.
San Francisco has long been a city of builders, a label once largely reserved for developers in the tech industry. But thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, a few well-crafted prompts in vibe-coding programs like Claude Code and Replit are all you need to create your own apps, websites and AI agents that can automate aspects of your workflow.
Poof! Now everyone's a builder: marketers, product managers, people working in the construction industry, tweens. The term is appearing in profiles all over LinkedIn and in social-media posts. Claude and Replit have seen their global monthly average user counts surge.
"Every single person and their mama is a builder," says Willis Clayton-Stankowski, 25, who lives in Oakland. "I'm still not entirely sure what that means."
Clayton-Stankowski was until recently a project engineer at a Bay Area construction company. Surrounded by friends who work in tech -- many using automated coding programs -- he started thinking about what he could automate at work. He also wondered why he was paying $10 a month for a habit-tracking app when he could build one himself. So he did .
He was hooked. Soon he was identifying ways to save time and money using AI at the office. He even pitched a new role for himself: AI engineer. He started last month.
The building bug has been catching on across the U.S. but San Francisco is , unsurprisingly, the heart of the boom . Talk to enough builders here and a journalist might start to wonder if she should be marketing herself not as a writer but as a builder of stories.
Madina Gbotoe, 35, has overlapped with engineers for years in her work as a product manager at a healthcare company. But she'd never coded before. After joining an organization called Women Defining AI, she started using OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude Code.
Now, she has a freelance side business building websites; AI fields new inquiries and creates an account for viable clients. A Claude-based agent books her airline tickets and hotels, and she recently built another to help with her new German shepherd puppy.
"I consider myself a builder," she says. "From zero to building."
To build, as she sees it, is to create an AI solution for your work or your home life. When she's out mingling, Gbotoe likes to ask: Who is building? She says everyone raises their hands. But when she digs deeper, around a fifth of them actually meet her definition. Some are using ChatGPT as a glorified search engine.
"That is not building," she says.
South of San Francisco, the children of Silicon Valley builders are taking up the family trade. Will Raybould, 11, learned how to use Claude Code from his dad, James, who spent 12 years at LinkedIn, including as a director of product. Will created both a videogame and an interactive geography website to teach the location of every country in the world, along with fun facts about each.
While Will can understand how using Claude Code might be daunting to a newbie, he assures those curious about building that it's not so hard. He recommends giving the program simple prompts at first; your skills will improve as you go.
"At times it will seem like it's going to be really annoying," he says. "But in the end it will work out."
Omar Maniya, a doctor operating several urgent-care practices in New Jersey, got into building after tinkering with ChatGPT for a year. One night he was captivated by a podcast about what was possible with automated code.
"It took a few weeks but I was obsessed," he says. "I'm in bed at midnight with my laptop building apps."
Building is still a nascent practice in the tri-state area. Maniya suspects that if he told anyone in his circles he was building, they'd think he was renovating his kitchen.
"People on the East Coast don't know what it is to be a builder," he says.
Those at his offices do. Maniya built an agent with Replit that can log in to diagnostic platforms, pull patient test results and add them to their charts. He told his staff to suggest ideas they'd like to see come to fruition, then he and his partner built them. They've churned out 10 apps so far, and three more are coming.
Saving lives is great, he says, but there's a different gratification that comes from having an idea in your head and then seeing it come to life.
"I'm feeling this intoxication of what engineers have probably felt for decades," he says.
Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
