I think the deluge on projects on show HN points to something real, its possible today to ship projects as a one man shop that looks like something that just a year or so would have required a team.

Personally I have noticed strange effects, where I previously would have reached for a software package to make something or solve an issue, its now often faster for me to write a specific program just for my use case. Just this weekend I needed a reel with a specific look to post on instagram but instead of trying to use something like after effects, i could quickly cobble together a program that was using css transforms that outputted a series of images I could tie together with ffmpeg.

About a month ago I was unhappy with the commercial ticketing systems, they were both expensive and opaque so I made my own. Obviously for a case like that you need discipline and testing when you take peoples money, so there was a lot of focus on end to end testing.

I have a few more examples like this, but to make this work you need to approach using LLMs with a certain amount of rigour. The hardest part is to prevent drift in the model. There are a certain number things you can do to make the model grounded in reality.

When the tool doesn’t have a reproducer, it’ll happily invent a story and you’ll debug the story. If you ground the root cause in for example a test, the model can get context enough to actually solve the problem.

Another issue is that you need to read and understand code quickly, but its no real difference from working with other developers. When tests are passing I usually do a PR to myself and then review as I usually would do.

A prerequisite is that you need tight specs, but those can also be generated if you are experienced enough. You need enough domain intuition to know what ‘done’ means and what to measure.

Personally I think the bottleneck will go from trying to get into a flow state to write solutions to analyze the problem space and verification.