“Teams create product soul. You can't vibe code a brand. People want to connect with the apps that they use — they want to feel something. A recipe for failure is just to create something that has a function, which AI does really really well. You need more than that to be successful.”

You can't vibe-code a brand — teams create product soul, and soul is what users actually connect with

Schlenker's contrarian take on the 'billion-dollar one-person company' narrative: AI enables fast function creation, but function alone does not create the emotional connection that drives long-term retention and brand loyalty. Opal's brand — the gemstone visual metaphor, the opal-calm-mind etymology, the 'scrolling kills' campaign, the crack-the-gemstone reward interaction — required deliberate human craft. Competitors can copy features; they cannot copy accumulated taste. As AI lowers the cost of building app functions, brand and soul become the differentiator that cannot be commoditized.