alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Is AI the final nail in the coffin for solo developers?
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?
Comments
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.
“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.
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.
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!
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).
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...
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
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.)
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.
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?
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.