Building software used to require a team of engineers, months of work, and a healthy budget. Now, anyone with an idea and a few well-written prompts can launch an app over the weekend.
That’s an incredible shift. It’s also creating a new problem. Founders are shipping products they barely understand, security flaws are slipping into production, and promising startups are discovering that software built quickly doesn’t always survive contact with real users.
Miami-based startup Codistry thinks the answer isn’t slowing down AI, but rather helping people use it better.
“I know firsthand what it takes to build a platform to 100 million monthly users, and I’ve also seen what people can build today with AI, at a fraction of the cost,” founder and CEO Philip Camilleri [pictured above] told Refresh Miami.
“It is honestly insane. You can take almost any idea and build a product without investing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I’ve also seen amazing products implode because of security holes, scaling issues, or because someone vibe-coded the whole thing without really knowing what was happening beneath the hood. Codistry exists to fix that gap: helping AI-builders understand the tech fundamentals, and build things that don’t fall over the second real users show up.”
Camilleri, who helped grow fintech platform SmartAsset to more than 100 million monthly users, founded Codistry after experiencing how AI coding tools were changing software development. Rather than replacing engineers, he believes AI is changing what skilled builders can accomplish.
That philosophy sits at the heart of Codistry’s mission.
The startup is tackling two audiences at once: experienced software engineers looking to stay competitive in an AI-first world, and founders using AI coding tools without understanding the engineering principles behind them.
“We’re trying to preserve engineer careers,” COO John Feldman asserted. “You kind of need to know AI and utilize it to best preserve your career.”
At the same time, Codistry wants to help founders avoid what the team calls the “MVP graveyard.”
“People start an MVP, send it out, it breaks, they don’t know how to fix it because they don’t know the fundamentals of engineering, and then they start from scratch,” Feldman said.
To address both challenges, the company has built an eight-week online program. The first six weeks teach software engineering fundamentals before participants spend the final two weeks building a real product with guidance from the team.
“We want people to know that yes, you can use AI. AI is great. AI expedites 95% of the process,” Feldman said. “But if you don’t have the fundamentals of engineering under your belt, then it’s going to be very difficult to actually grow that platform.”
Before launching publicly, Camilleri ran pilot workshops with companies in Europe and the United States. One of the first took place with senior developers in Stockholm.
The engineers were skeptical at first. But two days after the workshop, the company’s engineering lead reported that the team had gone from “0 to 100 overnight.” The company later enrolled another 18 developers, including its senior staff engineers.
Codistry is currently preparing to launch its first public cohort on August 15 after spending its early months working primarily with enterprise customers. The startup has a team of five and, according to Feldman, sees Miami’s growing tech ecosystem as a natural place to expand.
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