@levelsio
1 App · 1 Tool · 11 Intel
Pieter Levels is a Dutch entrepreneur who studied business across the Netherlands and South Korea before teaching himself to code through a "12 startups in 12 months" challenge in 2014. Before pivoting to software, he earned income as a music producer on YouTube under the name Panda DNB. He became one of the most prominent figures in the indie hacking movement for building multiple profitable, fully bootstrapped businesses as a solo founder without employees or venture capital.
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Apps
An always-on AI-generated video channel where the live chat queues up what plays next.
Tools
Open-source Chrome extension bundling tab management, cookie editing, dark mode, and other utilities in one package.
Intel
Pieter Levels' fix for Claude's increasingly ornate prose: a memory instruction to always use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
A first-hand report from travel in China: with an eSIM routing through Hong Kong, xAI was the only Western provider that worked. Anthropic and OpenAI block Hong Kong from their side, so the failure is provider geo-blocking rather than local filtering.
Export every bank, business and brokerage account as CSV, hand it to Claude Code, and have it merge inconsistent transaction labels, categorise the lot and build a spending dashboard.
An indie builder's repeated attempts at long autonomous agent loops ended in code he had to throw away — around $900 spent and roughly 95% of the output reverted — leading to the position that reliable AI coding means stepwise, tightly scoped prompting rather than turning a loop loose on a codebase.
A mobile-first agent setup: one tmux session per project across Hetzner VPSes, launched by a small `tm` script tied to the folder name and reached from Termius on a phone. Claude Code stays open in each session, so a dropped connection resumes where it left off.
Why one solo operator won't wire user-submitted bug reports into his coding agent: an attacker can bury a backdoor in a feature request and instruct the agent to describe the resulting PR as a pagination fix, so human review sees the wrong change.
A working indie builder reports Claude Code refusing benign tasks, including downloading an archived 1990s game on copyright grounds, and argues the bigger problem is spillover: after one refusal the session turns pedantic and starts blocking unrelated work.
A builder's running list of SaaS replaced with self-built, AI-assisted services: a weather API, Sharp+Redis image resizing, NudeNET-based NSFW detection, Nginx video streaming, screenshot and uptime tools, and AI-driven moderation and support, totaling roughly $25,000/month in claimed savings.
A postmortem on replacing Scrapingbee: headless Chrome and off-the-shelf residential proxies both got detected and blocked, while a headful Playwright browser with persistent context and slow pacing reached ~90% success at $1/month versus $249/month.
Levelsio argues most end users will never touch code or even a chat interface explicitly: they'll just ask an AI to do bookkeeping or file taxes, and the app layer will vanish the way personal homepages did after Facebook, reshaping what building software for users means.
Levelsio describes discovering that a Claude API key embedded in his shut-down OpenClaw project was compromised and quietly used months later, caught only via a billing alert on an isolated account.