Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers? I guess making a decent living for solo developers from either apps or games was already extremely difficult. But with agentic coding, I feel it has now become almost impossible. That has also kind of removed my interest in side projects too, because there is probably no more chance of making any money from them, unless you are good at marketing. What is the opinion here? |
Or to reframe, AI tools allow everyone to have some base-level software engineering competency and makes everyone you're competing against vastly more productive.
Generally speaking if you want to make money you need to provide a product/service within a niche. If too many people are able to compete against you, or just do whatever you're providing themselves, then you have no addressable market. It doesn't matter how productive you are.
This is why SASS valuations are crashing right now. While they might all be more productive their competition from people able to roll their own CRM and cheap alternatives from vibe-coders has increased exponentially.
Arguably any project that was previously small enough that a single dev could maintain it is now probably vibe-codeable in less than a day.
And by the way it's SaaS, software as a service, Sass is a different tool, for CSS.
I see a torrent of poor ideas made a reality without enough thought put into them, designed without taste, and built without quality by people without the experience to maintain them.
Seeing as how LLMs just tell you what you want to hear and not what they think you need to hear I don't see this problem changing anytime soon. They might need to develop a different type of model to have it reason that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
Everyone is talking about how many things they are building. Non-devs suddenly building... But nobody seems to call out the basic law of supply and demand.
You can be the greatest marketer but you will fail when all channels are flooded. Thinking your "taste" will save you is a false fallacy, most mainstream products suck and people still buy them. There's not an infinite demand for software.
It will eventually settle in some new market configuration. However devs shouldn't have broken their market by letting everyone in, was a stupid professional move.
Nobody is throwing out their phone or computer. Software will still be needed.
That said, there will be a lot of noise, with 100 choices in each category, how does one rise to the top? Is it simply the one that sticks around the longest and doesn't become abandonware?
Imagine saying this about a great record album in music. Or any masterwork of art.
From growing up with my young brain being programmed by surrealist MTV videos, in a society driven by tiktok brains, creativity will be at an absolute premium.
Just the idea that this is a bad time for the solo developer is so uncreative that it boggles my mind but it is hardly surprising.
Those times were always pretty brief, and those markets were quickly saturated by people looking to make it rich. It was certainly not the state of anything in the years leading up to agentic coding.
AI is a fantastic learning tool. Getting smarter usually leads to more success.
AI is great when you don’t have skilled co-workers to bounce ideas off of: as an indy mostly open source developer, for a few decades I would write up five to ten pages of design notes, perhaps a few diagrams like UML sequence diagrams, and then mull over my little pile of design artifacts for a while, and then start coding. Now I still create my little pile of design artifacts but will burn tokens on Gemini in research mode to critique my ideas. Very useful.
For what is worth I have two different skills in claude code which are two reviewers with two distinct personalities.
At every plan I write, I have them review it and find edge cases, critique.
I don't think I've seen hallucinations since few opus versions at least.
Feedback is useful 4 times out of 5. Very useful actually. And one time is not very valuable or wrong (but it requires the two different skills to agree).
I'm able to use the agent to scaffold small projects that let me work on a single library I can test in isolation. I'm not exactly "vibe coding" an entire application, but definitely using the AI to be more effective with my time.
I get the feeling that we are in the golden age of LLM dev tools, where many tools like Claude Code are very subsidized. That will go away soon, and worse. In the most recent Dwarkesh podcast with Dario, he mentioned that not all tokens should cost the same.
He gave an example where tokens giving advice to restart a computer should be cheap. On the other hand, tokens advising a pharma company on molecules should be expensive.
In the near future I can imaging CC replying:
> That's a great idea, this will solve the problem in production! However, given the number of users I see, this will be charged at 20x. Would you like me to proceed?
The level of serious competition is surprisingly small. It mostly consists of people who could actually build without agentic LLMs but now get supercharged.
You will do far better if you’re out there, talking to potential or current customers, understanding their needs deeply, and solving them.
It very much pays to be a solo dev, but you have to be very “heads up” and spend more time with humans. IMO it’ll difficult to get by just as a heads down pure dev.
Finally LLMs don’t know everything. Even if they knew everything, they don’t know your clients full situation. Moreover your client wants your specific n=1 opinions/experiences, not whatever average of ideas lives in the LLM.
Know your industries business well. You’ll do well coaching clients not just on the tech, but the intersection of tech and the gaming business. If you’re in a position you could critique an LLM on a topic, or offer a different perspective, that has strong market value.
Directing the AI and using it to learn from is good.
Still, ideas about AI are currently ruining all sorts of markets (and being used as an excuse to lay off huge amounts of people, who then aren't going to be customers).
You can (possibly) do more now or do new things now.
(And AI is also disrupting marketing if that makes you feel any better.)
It was already the case that the hardest part of a project was getting people interested enough that they invest time into trying it.
But now, the fight to get people's attention on new projects is going to get an awful lot harder, as the barrier to entry dropped,and that people who are actually good at marketing can make apps themselves.
Otherwise, as a solo dev, you can leverage AI for both coding faster, and getting better at marketing.
He had a big sign out front that said, "We repair do-it-yourself repairs!"
It seems like agentic AI is an insane opportunity for solo developers!
Instead of programmers having to look for people with real world experiences to apply their skills to.
Lower barrier to entry = much more competition, lower prices, lower profit margins
Sorry to (not)disappoint, but it was _always_ like this.
If you analyze closely, every single solopreneurial success is based first and foremost on a successful marketing/sales. Whether by luck, hard work or being in the right place at the right time. The dev part and the product is never a main dish.
I've made things with Claude I wouldn't begin to do on my own.
Okay I've not made any money out of it, surely you always needed to be good at marketing. Or did you mean advertising?
Someone quickly vibe coding something might fulfill the requirements of an idea. However, their implementation will likely be poor and lack the care needed to connect with people on a way that makes them want to use it.
I think understanding this has always been the key to standing out. That doesn’t change in the world of LLM, it becomes more important than ever.
Now one could even envision a near future where they have agents running 24/7 automatically scanning for new SaaS projects and cloning them, and just throwing slop into the market to see if it sticks.
than Oracle all of a sudden being able to figure out (with AI, magic, or otherwise) what users want.
I wouldn’t worry about it anymore than you worried about it pre-AI.