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?
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.
> 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.
By RevEng 2026-02-1814:30 But by the same logic, people who could readily code small projects can now code large projects. It helps everyone, not just the non-programmers. There is still a large gap between what an amateur can do and what a professional can do, so the competitive advantage is still there.
By satvikpendem 2026-02-1814:34 It's a self-solving problem because people don't know how to market, which is 10x harder than development and which an AI cannot really help with, and that's how the real money is made.
And by the way it's SaaS, software as a service, Sass is a different tool, for CSS.
By hogehoge51 2026-02-1815:10 it's not base-level. it shifts the margin, at low skill base-level and your marginal level may be similar. but if you have enough experience and know the complete SLDC , having done each role during your career it, the margin is a massive wedge. if you know a niche, you now know all the adjacent niches and technolgies IF you are open minded to want to know them. that has powerful leverage.
By jasondigitized 2026-02-1821:04 You can compete in more ways than technology. Taste, marketing, design, creativity, distribution, economics, etc.
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.
Big companies have always been able to copy your project for pennies, relatively.
Yes but even then, it required people assigned to the project, middle management and time.
Now one could even envision a near future where they have agents running 24/7 automatically scanning for new SaaS projects and cloning them, and just throwing slop into the market to see if it sticks.
By DANmode 2026-02-193:31 Way more concerned about the one-man shops who have no real sturdy backend or support services trying to drive-by undercut important industries
than Oracle all of a sudden being able to figure out (with AI, magic, or otherwise) what users want.
By keiferski 2026-02-1819:45 This isn’t really how marketing works, and randomly throwing slop into the market is not how good brands get built.
I wouldn’t worry about it anymore than you worried about it pre-AI.
By marginalia_nu 2026-02-1812:401 reply 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.
By rkozik1989 2026-02-1814:44 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.
By dudewhocodes 2026-02-1811:331 reply 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.
By midnitewarrior 2026-02-1815:52 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?
