In the past, the effort it took to make a polished tool was much higher and hardly worth it for one self alone. We've pushed that bar up significantly.
LLMs causing a flood of apps is an interesting problem to watch the indiehackers around me try to navigate. I've watched them try to sneak around automods on Reddit or post just the right way to not piss people off, do Instagram ads, enter game jams... One guy actually had a lot of luck on Facebook groups, actually got some paid members for his Chinese learning app, which surprised me because basically every white guy that moves to Taiwan creates a Chinese learning app. Couldn't believe one actually got revenue.
Idk, maybe this is why compared to my peers I don't have much money, or the co-op I founded doesn't generate as much revenue as it probably could, but something just feels icky about it. I don't want to try to stick my head above the water of ten thousand of the same people doing the same thing. The effort to payoff ratio seems broken. I just want to build things, some of which are useful or fun. Maybe I'm too much of a dirty anarchist but it seems a lot more fun to me to make something and give it away for free that someone else is trying to charge for, than to try to monetize everything I do.
But I do wonder what's going to happen to indie game devs and hackers. I suspect that the burn-fast quick ramp up and validation strategy will begin fail, and what will make software worth paying for in the future is software that grew slowly and proved out its usefulness, maintenance, and development cadence over a long period of time. Before, you could validate an idea relatively quickly, maybe now you can just pick a couple ideas, stick to them, and cross your fingers.
Self proclaimed Indiehackers for the most part don't produce anything of value anyhow and have been in the flood the market game for a decade. It's very much a case of X made $1000 doing Y so now I'm doing Y but for Z and when it doesn't get instant traction I am going to stop updating it/stop paying for the hosting in 2 months.
It's how we ended up with more niche job boards with scraped postings than there are altcoins and seven million sites that are nomadlist but in a different niche with bad data.
We're entering the age of personal software. Everyone who is motivated will have a catalog of unreleased custom software to solve their own problems. No need for support, no need for community management. It's often said that LLMs can get you to an 80% prototype very quickly but polishing to a public release is really hard and still takes a ton of time. Well, 80% is good enough for my own use, which means solving problems quickly, for myself.
Absolutely! And who wants to deal with warts you couldn't even imagine but will likely encounter if project was github hosted, gained traction, and gets the typical commentary/requests/abuse from randoms.
I've been considering opening a 2nd GitHub profile just for AI stuff. I'll link to it from my regular profile, I'm not hiding it! If someone's checking me out for a job or whatever, it might be nice to have differentiate between ideas of mine, and things I've spent time making.
I’ve taken the viewpoint that a domain is basically a cup of coffee per year in cost and static web hosting is literally free so have been putting a ton of stuff up. None of these have ads or make me any money, just listing here as an example of the ease of sharing;
tfmbot.com - an implementation of my favourite board game complete with ai that plays against you
thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for a game Newstower that was fun but a little grindy ao i asked ai to figure out the save game format and make this online save editor
grandcheaten.com - a guide and save game editor for jagged alliance 3
Basically all personal projects but i find sharing them out rewarding. Occasionally i’ll get abuse or large amounts of downvotes for daring to share ai generated content but, shrug, it’s useful to me and i’ve also had lots of messages of appreciation.
Indeed! After years of wanting to finally I was able to create my own budgeting app with my own needs with auto ingestion of transactions, an Uscis case tracker, gh stars organizer, you name it. The list of ideas I accrued over the years is just now 1 prompt away from being a testable iterable app that I can self host and use behind tailscale. Good enough for my wife even. There is something more addicting about building for others though, I did open source my apps in case it helps anyone, but I presume its why chefs become chefs, put something out and immediately see its effect on others. I guess now marketing will be even more important. Even for free and genuinely morally good ideas that don't have an agenda behind them and I am a bit scared that most people who care about marketing that much are not trying to spread free public utility around...
I posted some free little games/utilities i made just below in this thread and can attest that in general you do have to have thick skin and brace yourself for derision, abuse and downvotes on say Reddit or Linkedin if you dare to acknowledge you used AI in any way to create any form of content right now.
Which is silly because it doesn't help anything to deride creators that use the same tools the big corporations use.
>A few hours used to get a programmer a script; now it gets a polished app, and it gets a non-programmer something instead of nothing.
I think "polished" is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.
Don't get me wrong: I literally spend every weekday generating web UIs with Claude: I'm not anti-AI at all.
But to claim anything Claude produces as "polished" means limiting yourself to a very narrow definition of that term! If it didn't, people like me wouldn't get paid six figure salaries still (we'd be replaced by the AI that produces "polished" code).
Claude and Codex produce far more polished work than any of my side projects. Are they competitive with entire teams of professional developers working on standard (multi-week) project development schedules? I don't know. But it's weird to suggest that "unpolished" is their big problem.
The lack of polish is usually in the actual usability of the feature set (see yesterday's "polished photoshop clone" where the keyboard shortcuts just don't work)
I think you can use these tools to get something very polished. I have found that a lot of people get "tricked" into thinking that their result is good, but the people making these things and the people with expertise in the domain are often not that close to each other.
It is valuable for a thing to get used to figure out if it's actually any good.
Though the obvious glib thing is a lot of people build these tools and then don't use it.
(No not you, person who decides to reply to this saying 'but _I_ use it')
I'm sure it helps to have some design sense, or something. Whatever it is, I don't have it.
Each time I've tried to get some Web UI going with the AIs, they all look terrible. They may work, but, they're terrible. I know they're terrible. I can't really express why they're terrible, just that I don't like them. So, I cannot really explain to the AI why they're bad so they can fix it.
Its just a blindness of mine that I've had forever.
I keep trying this for very simple android apps and every pass between the Claude design tool and Claude code results in an uglier and less performant app. Woe is me, I have to actually learn this kotlin design / templating system.
Hard agree. Modern frontier models will give you a surprisingly solid first pass at a concept if prompted with a clear initial description and a handful of well-guided feature refinement rounds in an afternoon. That said, if you have a high bar for things like concise, well-architected codebases and strong, intuitive UX (the two main components of “polish” imo), you’ll find it takes a long time to get from Pareto-decent to truly polished.
If you look up the domain using their system and it doesn't exist, the person running the system could come in and buy it out from under you, and then offer to sell it back to you at a higher price. tbc I'm not accusing anyone of doing this, but that's the failure mode people are afraid of.
I spend way too much on domains I think are valuable, can't possibly afford to buy up every domain other people think are valuable as well. Big guys might though, I've always heard rumblings of this, never seen a real example though.
I believe this also: any domain name lookup service is actually a domain squatting service. When you look up a domain they buy it, then sell it to you for a markup.
The analysis of existing tools and why they are annoying is spot on, no one is paying for it, so existing solutions try to recoupe 4.57$ monthly revenue from ads.
But that means that the product you are launching is trying to undercut 4.57$/mo for 0$/mo, which is a losing proposition. Any proposition that tries to undercut a market that has already been driven to bottom prices will die of hunger.
Also, in terms of execution, there's a design choice "recent lookups" that is quite unconventional, and will kill the trust of your product, and your personal reputation.
By leaking your user's input and data, you have outed yourself as someone that cannot be trusted with user or commercial data.
You have died twice, first from hunger and then from reputational death. I am in a better position for having launched nothing than you are in for launching this.
Did you read the article? The entire point of building this was to solve a problem for myself. If anyone else wants to use it, that's also fine with me, but the goal of this was not to monetize this nor turn it into a serious project or business.
keyle | 22 hours ago
I think the author nailed it with this sentence:
> The audience can be one person.
In the past, the effort it took to make a polished tool was much higher and hardly worth it for one self alone. We've pushed that bar up significantly.
komali2 | 22 hours ago
Idk, maybe this is why compared to my peers I don't have much money, or the co-op I founded doesn't generate as much revenue as it probably could, but something just feels icky about it. I don't want to try to stick my head above the water of ten thousand of the same people doing the same thing. The effort to payoff ratio seems broken. I just want to build things, some of which are useful or fun. Maybe I'm too much of a dirty anarchist but it seems a lot more fun to me to make something and give it away for free that someone else is trying to charge for, than to try to monetize everything I do.
But I do wonder what's going to happen to indie game devs and hackers. I suspect that the burn-fast quick ramp up and validation strategy will begin fail, and what will make software worth paying for in the future is software that grew slowly and proved out its usefulness, maintenance, and development cadence over a long period of time. Before, you could validate an idea relatively quickly, maybe now you can just pick a couple ideas, stick to them, and cross your fingers.
CamperBob2 | 22 hours ago
We will find out who's good at game design, and who was just OK at game design and really good at coding.
howunfortunate | 21 hours ago
0gs | 20 hours ago
bakugo | 18 hours ago
howunfortunate | 18 hours ago
komali2 | 17 hours ago
howunfortunate | 17 hours ago
Whether you think it's doing a good job or not, I suppose that's your call
sanswork | 20 hours ago
It's how we ended up with more niche job boards with scraped postings than there are altcoins and seven million sites that are nomadlist but in a different niche with bad data.
slowin | 22 hours ago
AmazingEveryDay | 22 hours ago
orsorna | 21 hours ago
aviperl | 18 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | 21 hours ago
tfmbot.com - an implementation of my favourite board game complete with ai that plays against you
thedailycheat.com - a save game editor for a game Newstower that was fun but a little grindy ao i asked ai to figure out the save game format and make this online save editor
grandcheaten.com - a guide and save game editor for jagged alliance 3
Basically all personal projects but i find sharing them out rewarding. Occasionally i’ll get abuse or large amounts of downvotes for daring to share ai generated content but, shrug, it’s useful to me and i’ve also had lots of messages of appreciation.
armanckeser | 21 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | 21 hours ago
Which is silly because it doesn't help anything to deride creators that use the same tools the big corporations use.
hungryhobbit | 22 hours ago
I think "polished" is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence.
Don't get me wrong: I literally spend every weekday generating web UIs with Claude: I'm not anti-AI at all.
But to claim anything Claude produces as "polished" means limiting yourself to a very narrow definition of that term! If it didn't, people like me wouldn't get paid six figure salaries still (we'd be replaced by the AI that produces "polished" code).
tptacek | 21 hours ago
If anything: too polished!
(Like the words in this blog post, by the way).
packetlost | 21 hours ago
tptacek | 20 hours ago
packetlost | 7 hours ago
ricardobeat | 21 hours ago
rtpg | 20 hours ago
I think you can use these tools to get something very polished. I have found that a lot of people get "tricked" into thinking that their result is good, but the people making these things and the people with expertise in the domain are often not that close to each other.
It is valuable for a thing to get used to figure out if it's actually any good.
Though the obvious glib thing is a lot of people build these tools and then don't use it.
(No not you, person who decides to reply to this saying 'but _I_ use it')
DragonStrength | 20 hours ago
whartung | 19 hours ago
Each time I've tried to get some Web UI going with the AIs, they all look terrible. They may work, but, they're terrible. I know they're terrible. I can't really express why they're terrible, just that I don't like them. So, I cannot really explain to the AI why they're bad so they can fix it.
Its just a blindness of mine that I've had forever.
rgbrgb | 19 hours ago
komali2 | 17 hours ago
rgbrgb | 2 hours ago
pixelready | 18 hours ago
dberube | 21 hours ago
ivanjermakov | 21 hours ago
dberube | 21 hours ago
fragmede | 17 hours ago
dberube | 5 hours ago
komali2 | 17 hours ago
TZubiri | 19 hours ago
TZubiri | 19 hours ago
But that means that the product you are launching is trying to undercut 4.57$/mo for 0$/mo, which is a losing proposition. Any proposition that tries to undercut a market that has already been driven to bottom prices will die of hunger.
Also, in terms of execution, there's a design choice "recent lookups" that is quite unconventional, and will kill the trust of your product, and your personal reputation.
By leaking your user's input and data, you have outed yourself as someone that cannot be trusted with user or commercial data.
You have died twice, first from hunger and then from reputational death. I am in a better position for having launched nothing than you are in for launching this.
[OP] colinarms | 19 hours ago
komali2 | 17 hours ago
What if I'm doing this on purpose on my own dime, to kill for profit corporations out of spite?
Aka the Manfred Macx doctrine of startups.