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?
28 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadI'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?
You can (possibly) do more now or do new things now.
(And AI is also disrupting marketing if that makes you feel any better.)
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?
Instead of programmers having to look for people with real world experiences to apply their skills to.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Lower barrier to entry = much more competition, lower prices, lower profit margins
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.
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!