[RivieraKid]

The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.

[kevinsync]

> The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.

Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. It's like architecture, there are always improvements in materials, tools and processes, and Claude and Codex can provide more laborers for almost free, but most people are still gonna be building uninspired McMansions instead of the Guggenheim.

[0] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=112

[1] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=160

[RivieraKid]

Disagree. Ideas were a necessary component of the one project I had success with. BTW, the line between ideas and execution is blurred. Is coming up with innovative UI and features ideas or execution?

[lelanthran]

> I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate.

What do you mean "nothing has changed"? Using your numbers, the SNR went off a cliff.

Use HN as an example - I used read the new stories all the time before they hit the frontpage, and upvote as needed.

But with 100s of slop submitted for every 1 actual good article, I can't do that anymore.

IOW, I have finite time. If 10% of the population is now able to vomit out side-projects, I am never going to find the one good one because it will be lost in a sea of rubbish.

[hypfer]

No, why?

Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do?

Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself.

Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun.

Just because there are chess computers, doesn't mean that no one plays chess anymore at home.

[RivieraKid]

Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.

[ihaveajob]

Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.

[fuzzy2]

Maybe, but LLMs solve but one issue (maybe two). Take me, for example. I am highly proficient regarding software development in most aspects. Except for that tiny problem: I wouldn't even know what to build. And at least for me, LLMs could not help with that.

The whole side project or even private project thing doesn't just hinge on being able to produce software. There's a lot more.

[samiv]

It's like the business of selling electric drills. People don't really want drills they want holes. But holes are difficult to sell so the selling the drills is a proxy for that.

In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service).

You could argue that in either case the proxy is not what people want but yet because of the difficulty of selling the "actual" thing the proxy market has flourished.

We're now inventing a new tool that will completely disrupt that market and any software business that is predicated on the complexity required to create the software to transform the data is going to get severely disrupted. Software itself will be worthless.

[skydhash]

Software is not becoming worthless.

The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules.

What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode.

Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.

[rapind]

Yes it become much easier to fail fast and iterate, but also a lot of these fail fast projects are trivial for anyone to implement themselves. Differentiating your project is going to be tougher too.

A lot of the moats are gone, but quality (and security) is in a nose dive. AI built project might be the Ikea furniture. Good for the masses, but there's still a market (much smaller) for well crafted applications and services. It's hard to say what it'll look like in a couples years though. Maybe even the crafting is eventually gone. /shrug

[gilbetron]

But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs.

No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it.

Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.

[o_m]

I think we need to change our perspective of what success is. I believe there will be a ton of small companies popping up instead of a few big ones that eats everyone's lunch. Like Google, Microsoft and others giants have done until now.

[layer8]

The big ones are successful based on vendor lock-in, network effects, and regulatory capture. AI doesn’t change that dramatically.

[ehnto]

Are most side projects in competition? I wouldn't think so.

Even if they were I disagree that 10x more ideas being produced means 10x more products in competition. You could leverage AI to execute but still have terrible ideas, leadership, product stewardship etc.

I think some clever people with a real and valuable insight will finally be able to turn that insight into a product. I also think the other 9 products will be get rich quick attempts by people with nothing to offer.

[zozbot234]

If the competition just grew by 100x, where's all the great, high-quality, AI-vibe coded side products? Something just isn't adding up here. Could it be that vibe coding on its own just isn't all that useful, and most of those 10% are wasting their time?

[RivieraKid]

The counterpoint is that it's only 2 months since AI got really useful and it will presumably continue to improve. It takes a while until it spreads through the society.

[kcmastrpc]

I can relate. Sincerely debating whether I quit my well-paying and comfortable corporate job and just go full-time entrepreneur before the opportunities disappear.

[claytongulick]

I think the window of opportunity to create boring also-ran software is shrinking.

I think there's more opportunity to do something novel.

AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.

[ramesh31]

The game is all about content now. Forget software. Games, movies, books, music, etc. Things that people will always want regardless of how much there already is. Look at the success of AI slop authors and YouTube channels. That's our future.