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

I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a consideration that if they advertise their 1 eng status and success, it might attract other competitors or the customers might think they can do it themselves (maybe possible, but not for 95% of them since some tech know how is still required) or customers would see it as a business risk.

All 3 have blown me away with what they are doing. All 3 have real, paying customers. (They occasionally reach out for some higher order architecture questions)

So true, as a mere software developer on a payroll: I might spend 10 minutes doing a task with AI rather than an hour (w/o AI), but trust me - I am going to keep 50 minutes to myself, not deliver 5 more tasks )))) And when I work on my hobby project - having one AI agent crawling around my codebase is like watching a baby in a glassware shop. 10 babies? no thanks!

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

After months of hearing that people are producing software in months that would normally take years, the best examples of vibe coded software I've seen look like they would normally take months, not years. If you don't care how they're built or how long it took (which a user generally doesn't), much of the remaining shine comes off.

If I'm wrong, I'd love to see it. A genuinely big piece of software produced entirely (or near entirely?) with AI that would've normally taken talented engineers years to build.

I do stuff in my free time now that would have been a full time job a year ago. Accomplishing in months what would have taken years. (And doing in days what would have taken weeks.) I'm talking about actually built-out products with a decent amount of code and features, not basic prototypes. I feel like the vibe is "put up or shut up", so check out my bio for one example.

I think your logic goes wrong because you assume that more productivity implies less desire for engineers. But now engineers are maybe 2x or 5x more productive than before. So that makes them more attractive to hire than before. It's not like there was some fixed pool of work to be done and you just had to hire enough to exhaust the pool. It's like if new pickaxes were invented that let your gold miners dig 5x more gold. You'd see an explosion in gold miners, not a reduction. For another example, I spend all my free time coding now because I can do so much now. I get so much more result for the same effort, that it makes sense to put more effort in.

And to push this example further, if you can hire 10 developers each commanding 10 reliable junior-mid developers you have a team of 100, which is probably more than enough to build basically any software project in existence. WhatsApp was built with way less than that.

My brother is selling a CRM he developed for his business to others for a couple thousand a month.

There is no way he would have built the CRM as quickly pre-AI.

He built, in a few months, what would have taken maybe one to two years before.

It's probably going to be a while before someone builds the next Instagram with AI. But I think that's more a function of product fit and idea. Less so how fast one person can code.

The first billion-dollar solopreneur likely is going to happen at some point, but it's still a one-in-a-million shot, no matter how fast a person can code.

Look at how many startups fail despite plenty of money for programmers.

But I am seeing friends get to revenue faster with AI on small ideas.

A lot of people either a) don’t know about the good tools or b) aren’t using them enough/properly.

There is a ton of anti-AI sentiment, and not all LLMs are equal. There is a lot of individual adoption that is yet to occur.

I know at least two startups that are one person or two people that are punching way above their weight due to this force multiplier. I don’t think it’s industry-wide yet, but it will be relatively soon.

Check back in on your assessment in a year.

Because a startup is NOT just writing code. It's also understanding what you are building, and for whom.

The issues of product market fit did not suddenly disappear:

https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-startups...

If all of this really worked, Claude Code would not be a buggy, slow, frustratingly limited, and overall poorly written application. It can't even reload a "plugin" at runtime. Something that native code plugin hosts have been doing since plugins existed, where it's actually hard to do.

Claude Plugins are a couple `.md` file references, some `/command` handler registrations, and a few other pieces of trivial state. There's not a lot there, but you have to restart the whole damn app to install or update one.

Plus, there's the **ing terminal refresh bug they haven't managed to fix over the past year. Maybe put a team of 30 code agents on that. If I sound bitter, it's because the model itself is genuinely very good. I've just been stuck for a very long time working with it through Claude Code.

They are absolutely crushing it. I know of a one-man shop that just got notice they were selected for an eight-figure revenue contract. They would NEVER go public with their head count or their product being built by AI.

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

Oh, man, they're just waiting for their poster boy to show up. Once first unicorn "built by a single person" pops up you'll regret having a single social network account.

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

Who should be seeing that? The thing about 1 person startups is that it requires little to no communication to start up, and also very little capital. Seems easy to fly below the radar.

Also "a ton", idk. Doing a startup is still hard, for reasons outside of just being able to write a lot of code. In my experience churning out all this code at 10x is coming with a significant complexity tax: Turns out writing code and thinking about code problems was the relaxing part. When that goes away you have to think about real world problems only. What a fucking mess.

Still, I would assume that it's more of a thing now, and something you could observe when you have YC data for example. Do we know that's not the case? I am in no position to say, one way or the other.

My favorite movie quote as it pertains to software engineering has for a long time been Jurassic Park's: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

That’s how I feel about a lot of AI-powered development. Just because you can have 10 parallel agents cranking out features 24/7 and have AI write 100% of the code, that doesn’t mean you’re actually building a product that users want and/or that is a viable business.

I’m currently in this situation, working on a greenfield project as founder/solo dev. Yes, AI has been tremendously useful in speeding things up, especially in patching over smaller knowledge gaps of mine.

But in the end, as in all the projects before in my career, building the MVP has rarely been the hard part of starting a company.

I agree with you. I don’t think number of startups or less reliance on funding is the measure though.

Businesses are not code. They solve problems, find their customers, convince them to buy their solution, and maintain that relationship.

Code has always been a factor but not the critical one.

"pushing 996"

What does this mean? You mean they have close to 1k employees? Odd typo or odd way to say it.

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

How do you know this is not happening. There is always a lag. By the time you visibly see it, its already past.

are there really startups (in the US) pushing 996?

> I see Bay area startups pushing 996 and requiring living in the Bay area because of the importance of working in an office to reduce communication hurdles.

This is toxic behavior by these companies, and is not backed by any empirical data that I’ve ever seen. It should be shunned and called out.

As far as the remainder of your post, I think you’ve uncovered solid evidence that the abilities of LLMs to code on their own, without human planning, architecting, and constant correction, is significantly oversold by most of the companies pushing the tech.

I'm a 1-person startup doing pretty well.

I got laid off in the first half of 2025 and decided to use my severance to see if I could go full-time with my side project. Over the last six months I've gone from zero to about $200k in ARR, and 75% of that was in the last three months. My average customer is paying about $250 / month.

I have zero help, I do everything myself: coding, design, marketing, sales, etc. The product uses AI to replace humans in a niche industry, so the core of the product is AI, but I also increasingly build it with AI. I rarely code manually these days, I'm just riding herd on agents, often in between sales calls, dealing with customer support, etc. I may eventually hire a VA-type person to help with admin and customer support stuff where it changes often enough that it's not worth it to build an AI workflow for, but even there...I don't know. If we get reliable computer use models in 2026 or 2027, I probably won't ever hire anyone.

I've never talked openly in tech circles about this product, nor will I. The technical challenges are non-trivial, so I don't think it'd be easy to replicate for another engineer, but my competitors are all dinosaurs and getting customers to switch to me is incredibly easy. The last thing I need is another engineer spinning up a competitor.

> 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)