We're on the cusp of an indie software boom. The reasons why exist in Taleb's antifragility thesis: the antifragile will gain from disorder. The nature of the

We're on the cusp of an indie software boom. The reasons why exist in Taleb's antifragility thesis: the antifragile will gain from disorder. The nature of the tech industry, in the decades roughly since the Cold War ended(which put to rest a certain pattern of tech focused on the MIC and moved SV forward into its leadership position), has promoted fragility along several of Taleb's dimensions: it aims to scale, it aims to centralize, and it aims to intervene. The pinnacle achievement of this trend is probably the iPhone, a convergent do-everything device that promises to change your life. But it's axiomatic(in Taleb's view, which I will defer to since his arguments are good enough for me) that this won't last, and with talk of "the end of the US empire", and a broader pessimism in tech, there seems to be popular agreement that we are done with the scale narrative. AI is a last holdout for that narrative since it justifies further semiconductor investment, stokes national security fears of an "AI race" and so on - it appeals to forces with big pocketbooks, that are also big in scale, and also in a position of fragility themselves. But eventually they will tap out too, for the same reasons. Whether that's a "next year" thing or a "twenty years" thing is hard to predict - the fall of the USSR was similarly hard to predict. The things that are antifragile within software are too abstract to intentionally develop within a codebase, and are more a measure of philosophy and how one models the world with data - CollapseOS is at the extreme end of this, where the viewpoint is bacterial - "all our computing infrastructure is doomed if it is not maintainable by solo operators" - but there are intermediate points along it where the kinds of software that are needed are in that realm of a plugin to a large app or an extension to an existing framework, and development intentionally aims not to break outside that scope. That thesis agrees with the "small niches" view of things. Since we have succeeded in putting computers into every place we can think of, many of the things we need to do with them do already have a conventional "way of doing it," but can exist in a standard and don't need to be formalized behind a platform and business model - and LLM stuff does actually have some role in serving that by being an 80% translator of intent, while a technical specialist has work in adding finish and polish. And that side of things agrees with going deeper into the stack. I believe one pressing issue that's faced with this transition is the inclination brought from the corporate dev environment to create a generalized admixture of higher and lower level coding - to do everything as a JS app with WASM bits that are "rewritten in Rust" - when what indie software needs is more Turbo Pascals, Hypercards, and Visual Basics, environments that are tuned to be complete within themselves and towards the kinds of apps being written, while being "compatible enough" to deploy to a variety of end-user systems.