Public Biography
Derek Paulsen is a freelance software developer based in Austin, Texas, who gained public attention in March 2026 after a prolonged vibe coding session left him temporarily unable to determine whether he had authored the instructions governing his own workflow or whether they had been generated by the artificial intelligence he was collaborating with.
Mr. Paulsen, 34, holds a degree in computer science from Texas State University. He has worked as a freelance developer since 2019, primarily building web applications for small businesses and startups in the Austin area. He describes his specialty as “full-stack, with an emphasis on whatever the client thinks full-stack means.”
He lives in the East Cesar Chavez neighborhood of Austin with his wife, Jenna Paulsen, a pediatric occupational therapist. He adopted vibe coding as his primary development methodology in late 2025, describing the practice as “the future of software, assuming the future of software doesn’t require you to understand the software.”
Mr. Paulsen has since resumed writing code manually, though he concedes that the web application produced during his fourteen-hour session remains “the best thing I’ve ever shipped, and I’m not sure I shipped it.”