The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup

Agreed, the author basically says that coding is not required anymore, the job is reviewing code. Do engineers not actually want to build things themselves anymore? Where is the joy and pride in the craft? Are we just supposed to maximize productivity at the expense of our life's experience? Are we any different than machines at that point?

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?

Too early. Wait a year. People are just coming to grips how to really make these agents make good changes and large enough changes to really start accelerating.

Also, expect a number of those startups to be entirely stealth and wait longer to raise, as well as maybe in many cases be more fleeting and/or far more fast moving (having to totally re-invent what they're doing at a pace you wouldn't expect to before).

I've been full in on this for 2 years now, and I'm only just at the stage where I feel my setups and model capabilities are intersecting to produce results good enough that I've started testing if one project I'm working on will actually manage to generate revenue.

I'm not going to tell you what it is, because if I did there's too little moat and HN is crawling with great people who could probably replicate it and execute on it faster than me, and Claude is capable of doing all the heavy lifting entirely by itself - that in itself is what makes it potentially viable -, so sorry for being vauge.

If it shows signs of generating revenue, it'll be so cheap to scale because of Claude, that I'll be able scale it far before I need to raise any capital.

But other people will figure it out, most likely other people are already doing the same thing.

As a result I have a short window, and it likely will close as model improvements will make it more and more trivial to do what I'm trying to do, so my approach is to try to extract as much return as I can in as little time as I can, hoping there isn't yet too much competition, and then move on.

This last part will also limit - a lot of people just won't be able to move fast enough (I might not have), and so a lot of these "one person startups" won't ever become visible because they won't even get to a stage where people are ready to talk about it.

In this case, it is easily measurable how much time Claude has saved me, because I've done the same thing before, manually, and made money from it, and the fastest turnaround I've achieved before was 21 days. So far, my first test run with Claude + me in the loop produced the same quality in 3 days, my second in 2 days, my third 12 hours, and I think I can drive it down towards 1-2 hours of my time, with me being the blocker to speeding it up beyond that.

At 21 days it wasn't really profitable. At 1-2 days it "should be" wildly profitable unless I'm already too late. If I can get it down to an hour or two of my time, then I'd also be able to hire to scale it further with good margin, and the question is just finding the sweet spot.

This opportunity will never be a unicorn, but there's a lot of money there if you don't need to raise, and the cost of scaling it to the sweet spot where I maximise my returns is something I should be able to finance without outside money the moment I validate that the unit economics are right.

You might not hear about this "one person startup" again until it either has failed and I decide to tell the story, or it's succeeded but the opportunity has closed and I've made what I can make from it. I suspect there will be many cases like mine that you'll never hear about at all.

(and yes, I realise a lot of people will just dismiss this as bullshit because I won't give details; that's fine)

Credit usage.

It is a long-standing policy at Netflix for employees to pay for their own subscriptions. It ensures that employees "live the member experience".

I "just" created a real-time strategy game before christmas because I could have Claude writing all the code and test it itself. It wrote the spec too, by me telling it to plan out a game "a bit like X but with A, B, C features instead".

It works. It's playable. I might put it online some-time when I get a chance.

[EDIT: My involvement apart from the code-skimming mentioned below was mostly play-testing after Claude had "play-tested", and giving it feedback on what to add or change]

My best estimate from having written much simpler games before was that it churned out many months worth of working code in days. I've not written a line of it - just skimmed some code and told it to make a few architectural refactors.

It's absolutely crazy.