Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Technical CEOs Are Writing Production Code at Night Again

Max Levchin · Max Levchin: “The Net IQ of the World Is About to Go Up 50 Points” · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Apr 13, 2026 · at 1:16:22

Affirm CEO Max Levchin explains to Molly O'Shea how modern AI and developer tools are enabling technical executives to actively ship production software again.

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“I really love learning from very technical CEOs these days, because all of us are trying to keep up and sort of do our day job and run a company and set strategy and sort of figure out what the future looks like. But also by night, we're suddenly all back to writing code, which we thought we sort of did the last of five years ago or 10 years ago. And in like production environment, like all of us who loves programming Tinkered until recently and suddenly you don't have to tinker. You can just build and actually produce real products and kind of watch your work go live.”

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