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AI agents now write, review and test most new code, and Chai Choudhary, solo founder and CEO of Workers IO, told Julian Weisser on Solo Founders that most engineers can no longer say what their own tests check.
Most software teams still treat failure as normal and restart a broken service until it works. Chai's company tries to prove in advance which failures can never happen.
"Nobody's buying code. Like, people are buying that if I'm going to implement this database in my bank, it's going to handle all the workloads that we see and you're not going to lose data."
Chai learned to program on paper in a Rajasthan village, started his first company in college and sold it just before it would have become far more valuable. He then saved enough personal runway to spend years on Workers IO.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 13 minutes of audio, 11 minutes of reading.
Here are the 11 lessons that matter.
Solo Founders · Oct 28, 2026 · 1h 13m · 62m saved
With Chai Choudhary, Solo Founder and CEO of Workers IO
Key Takeaways
Workers IO turns checking software into a computing problem, running systems through simulated production scenarios to find what breaks
Customers are buying reliability guarantees, not code, because agents now write most of it and engineers have lost track of what their tests check
A few customers running thousands of agents can create the load of millions of human users, so even small teams need reliable systems
Workers IO found real, if minor, bugs in Postgres, one of the most heavily tested databases in the world, while testing a customer's stack
Chai sold his first company just before cheap internet access in India made it far more valuable
He calls the costliest founder mistake assuming things are "as good as it ever will be"
Chai killed an AI travel agent and an AI email client fast before settling on verification
Chai thinks founders should start solo by default, and calls the downside loneliness and sole blame
1. Verification Becomes Compute
Workers IO runs mission-critical software through simulated production scenarios to find failures before customers do. Instead of a team listing every way a system could fail, the software explores the system's possible states for them.
Workers IO converts software verification into a compute problem and gives customers guarantees about what will never fail
"We are basically taking this problem of verifying software and converting it into a compute problem... you systematically explore the state space of your system and give the guarantees to your customer that these are the things that'll never fail or fall apart." — Chai Choudhary
The "state space" is every combination of conditions the system can be in. Computers can search far more of it than a team of engineers writing test cases by hand.
