School Leaders Are Quietly Replacing Edtech They Used To Buy

3 May 2026

By Dan Fitzpatrick

A growing group of school leaders across the U.S., Europe and Africa are using AI and vibe coding to build their own classroom and district tools, replacing edtech subscriptions in the process.

For the last several weeks, I've been spending a lot of time on video calls with school leaders who don't think of themselves as technical.A deputy principal in South Africa. A senior innovation leader working with school districts in New Hampshire. A career and technical education teacher in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. A consultant supporting New Jersey principals. A senior leader at a Connecticut association of independent schools. An assistant superintendent in upstate New York. A head teacher at an international school in southern Africa. An assistant principal in the U.S. Midwest leading his district's AI task force.They're part of a leadership cohort I'm running with Sabba Quidwai, founder of Designing Schools and one of the most thoughtful voices in AI strategy for education. School leaders, with strong representation across the U.S., Europe and southern Africa. The premise is straightforward: instead of taking another course about AI, they spend 10 weeks designing and shipping a real solution to a real problem in their own schools, using AI, design thinking and vibe coding.We're three weeks in. Most have a working prototype. What's actually different in 2026The reason this works is that the technical floor has dropped to the ground.Vibe coding, a term coined in 2025 by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, describes a workflow where a human describes what software should do in plain English and an AI agent builds it. Tools like Replit, Google AI Studio, Lovable and Claude have made this accessible to people without a coding background.The cohort sees this in practice every week. In our last session, I demonstrated Google AI Studio by typing a single prompt: build an AI policy assistant for a school, trained on this PDF. Within five minutes, a working chatbot was on screen, branded, conversational, ready to be tested. Several participants were already further along, one shared that she'd moved past the prototype stage in her own work and was using Claude to...