Ask HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?

[sarbajitsaha]

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?

[keiferski]

I 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.

[kypro]

> 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.

[dysoco]

On one hand yes, but also a big company can now potentially copy your project for pennies and have far bigger outreach and marketing so they eat your market.

[marginalia_nu]

There'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.

[rkozik1989]

Giving an audience something they never asked for is very easy when you don't have much experience interacting with them. That's where a lot of would be entrepreneurs and creators alike stumble. They forget (or don't know to) quantify the size of their obtainable market before taking action and building something.

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.

[dudewhocodes]

I'm expecting a similar situation to the Video game crash of 1983 which happened due to total market saturation with low quality products.

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.

[midnitewarrior]

Yes but back then, everybody just got bored of their Ataris and moved on.

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?

[upmind]

As 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!

[topocite]

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 my mind but it is hardly surprising.

[mark_l_watson]

Two mildly contrary points:

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.

[rkozik1989]

The problem with bouncing ideas off of AI is that you still need to know enough to know when something is likely a hallucination. Because unless you're double-checking it with some kind of regular cadence you're probably accepting fiction as fact. Its really easy to just trust everything these chatbots output because of the style of communication. I'll be the first admit I fall for this trap all the time.

[lm28469]

The code was never the barrier, and that's why nothing has changed in the past years. Product and marketing are the hard part, complying to regulations is another, coding is easy unless you're working on extremely niche projects

[tracker1]

I can only speak for myself and will say that AI coding has gotten me more involved with personal project ideas I've let just sit for years. Mostly in that I'm able to be several times more productive than I am on my own.

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.

[codingdave]

No, the opposite is true. If you are building something good, you can do it even easier as a solo dev. The only people who will get shut down by all this is the people whose ideas were low quality, and whose only value was "I can code and you cannot."

[consumer451]

> you can do it even easier as a solo dev.

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?

[geldedus]

On the contrary, solo devs would produce even more output.

[epolanski]

To the point where there's much more competition, no?

[saidnooneever]

code quality and product quality is dropping fast. so your hand-crafted-actually-working-api-tokens-secure-in-a vault-on+backend-tests-cover-more-than-happy-path-app is raising in value actually...

[softwaredoug]

“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.

[stuaxo]

If 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).

[chvid]

Marketing has always been what makes or brakes a project.

You can (possibly) do more now or do new things now.

(And AI is also disrupting marketing if that makes you feel any better.)

[d--b]

This absolutely.

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.

[paulcole]

Growing up I had a favorite fishing tackle shop that I'd go to all the time. In addition to selling bait and tackle, the owner also did maintenance and repairs on rods and reels.

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!

[carlosjobim]

AI coding inverts the situation. Now solo entrepreneurs can get code for their projects and don't need a programmer.

Instead of programmers having to look for people with real world experiences to apply their skills to.

[whattheheckheck]

With the ease of processing larger amounts of information, solo devs need to work on projects that decrease addiction tendencies, and increase informed political participation

[AstroBen]

I'm not sure its a complete nail in the coffin but its definitely going to make things much harder

Lower barrier to entry = much more competition, lower prices, lower profit margins

[the_harpia_io]

honestly the opposite has been true for me. I ship faster alone now than I did with a small team two years ago - the AI handles the boring scaffolding and I focus on the parts that actually matter. the real problem isn't that solo devs can't compete, it's that the bar for what counts as a product just dropped through the floor. everyone and their dog has a landing page and a waitlist now. so yeah you need marketing, you always did, but now you also need to not look like every other vibe-coded weekend project. I think the solo devs who were already good at taste and knowing what to cut will do fine. the ones who were just technically skilled but building things nobody asked for - AI doesn't fix that, it just makes it faster to build something nobody wants

[ekjhgkejhgk]

If AI is so great as they say, why don't the solo developers use it?

[delaminator]

You think that the force multiplier is going to make you less able to express your force?

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?

[bdcravens]

Not 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.

[aristofun]

> unless you are good at marketing.

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.