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Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
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Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#12“Good at marketing” means a lot in the agentic coding era
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.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#13There's certainly more weekend projects being built, but the vast majority of it is unabashed shovelware.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#14If an app is to have qualiy then AI isn't nearly enough.
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).
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#15As much as people like to say, I don't think ideas are cheap. The best e.g., indie games didn't succeed just because of great execution but also great ideas and a good vision. I still think that holds true today. Happy building!
Exactly. The idea that ideas are cheap and all that matters is execution is absurd. 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…
There have been times in history when merely having the ability to turn an idea to software has been such a marketable skill you could fairly effortlessly get rich off it, like the early mobile app era saw some examples of that.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#16On the contrary, solo devs would produce even more output.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#17I don’t see how this follows. If anything, ai tools let you be vastly more productive as a single dev. The limiter is and has always been the idea and your ability to market it.
> ai tools let you be vastly more productive as a single dev
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.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#18As much as people like to say, I don't think ideas are cheap. The best e.g., indie games didn't succeed just because of great execution but also great ideas and a good vision. I still think that holds true today. Happy building!
Exactly. The idea that ideas are cheap and all that matters is execution is absurd. 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…
Ideas were “cheap” before because implementation was harder. Now I guess the coin has flipped.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
#19Not really. It just doubles down on the concept that in software business, the code is the easy part, and that by itself, code isn't a moat.
Re: Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
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