10 ms·
Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
- nicbou 1y agoI call it “move slow and fix things”. Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining. This has been my business for almost a decade. I love when I find other people with similar focus. My latest find is shottr.cc.
- ffitch 1y agoHey, I’m the author of Shottr. It’s super gratifying to know that there are people who see the app that way : ) thank you for saying this!
- pcald 1y ago[flagged]
- mooreds 1y agoInteresting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling. Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster. The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.
- j45 1y agoMaking tools to make the tools is the real devops. CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.
- tstrimple 1y agoThose are called jigs and they really separate the good from great woodworkers. Tamar from 3x3Custom is probably one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers because she's all about making and using jigs. Typically they are trying to eliminate manual measurements for repeatable parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng
- kylecazar 1y agoBuilding things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.
- derwiki 1y agoYep, totally — the OG advice was founder-focused. I just couldn’t resist twisting it a bit, because the line itself is too good not to repurpose.
- netcan 1y agoYeah... i think that's pretty clear right from your title.
- kylecazar 1y agoI didn't mention it in my original comment, but I enjoyed your article -- and agree that small, personal, purpose-built tools are having a moment in the age of LLM's. I like that application of AI. In a way (as I understood it), what you're getting at is that not everything has to be a business. Businesses definitely do have to scale, but personal software doesn't.
- j45 1y agoIt's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on. They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.
- salomonk_mur 1y agoBuilding a particular type of company - a tech startup. I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).
- 1y ago
- nickserv 1y agoI feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- midhir 1y ago> Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts. Why does this happen? How is it economical?
- j45 1y agoThey are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated. Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.
- ACCount37 1y agoAutomated attacks, running on botnets or other breached servers. Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.
- bravesoul2 1y agoPut a challenge in. A shitty hidden field honeytrap challenge can massively reduce this without needing to present people with a puzzle.
- trenchpilgrim 1y agoIt's economical because the compute and bandwidth come from devices infected with malware.
- m3kw9 1y agoMoney maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.
- zahlman 1y ago> There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.” Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359
- derwiki 1y agoHaha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week
- quuxplusone 1y agoI agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting. On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))
- derwiki 1y agoThe postcard app is gated by a verification queue. FWIW, so far no one has tried to sign up. Also there’s an address book so it’s not just for mom :-)
- tlhunter 1y agoIt's definitely the first result on Google and sort of ruins any credibility of the article.
- mekoka 1y agoAnyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?
- 1y ago
- godot 1y ago> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc. When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.
- derefr 1y agoI think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks. The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators. Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto. The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.) Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest. In real-world terms: • Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks. • Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks. • Group therapy sessions are good social networks. • A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there. Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.) • I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.) • BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was. Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.) It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.
- Kibranoz 1y agoOpen source your apps so other people can use it and host it on their own if they want. Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software
- easton 1y ago> It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom. Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pikseladam 1y agoEkşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project
- emseetech 1y agoI wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart. Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.
- celaleddin 1y agoInteresting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly). I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version. I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed. I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.
- samdixon 1y agoThis reads like a LinkedIn post
- manoDev 1y ago> The cost to build is so low now. The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.
- priyanmuthu 1y agoIf the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.
- manoDev 1y agoYes – but when people say "AI", most often they are talking about the latest OpenAI/Claude development.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoTodays open models are the latest OpenAI/Claude X months ago.
- nine_k 1y agoCan you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?
- jvanderbot 1y agoAider!
- derwiki 1y ago+1 Aider, first time I used it I knew I was looking into the future
- brabel 1y ago
- nine_k 1y agoIt's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby. Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money. A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...
- hgomersall 1y agoMost businesses make enough money but not necessarily a lot of money. Slightly fewer make decent money. It's not that common for a business to make its founders "a lot" of money. 95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.
- deepfriedbits 1y agoI love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.
- TomWhitwell 1y agoAn app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- supportengineer 1y agoIf I was a successful billionaire, and I didn’t want any competition, I would tell all the young smart people to go play in a different field
- ggambetta 1y agoIn my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project. Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.
- pimlottc 1y agoI agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.
- j3th9n 1y agoThan you probably never used ChatGPT for coding.
- bravesoul2 1y agoIt's like we have a 3D printer where before there was only injection molding.
- topaz0 1y agoThis was my first thought as well -- even some of the examples in the post are pre-llm.
- theropost 1y agoBut what if everything scales but what if no matter how complicated how obscure how mundane how niche what if everything I mean everything scales
- krapp 1y agoEverything I mean everything doesn't scale.
- aetherson 1y agoI use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games. There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have. But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do. And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well." Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything. It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.
- lionkor 1y agoIs it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?
- aetherson 1y agoIt's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE. I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.
- zer00eyz 1y agoThis is a chord, this is another chord, this is a third chord. Now start a band. I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process. Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.
- pcald 1y agoReminds me of Maciej Ceglowski’s seminal “Barely Succeed: It’s Easier” https://youtu.be/5Vt8zqhHe_c?si=Etv3Gz5f0bfAw6gM https://youtu.be/5Vt8zqhHe_c?si=Etv3Gz5f0bfAw6gM
- YetAnotherNick 1y ago> Growth would make it worse, not better. Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.
- salomonk_mur 1y agoOnly in theory. Most times none of those stakeholders get anything but wages and recognition.
- YetAnotherNick 1y agoWhat do you mean by anything?
- halfi 1y agoHi
- jonovate 1y ago>"A few strangers from the Orange Site signed up" Is that us? Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
- alexchantavy 1y agoGuess it better scale then :-)
- TN1ck 1y agoHad a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.
- anonzzzies 1y agoI find running a company over 50 people not nice. We had a few 1000 and it just really sucks imho.
- iancmceachern 1y agoCheck out the book "Small Giants, companies that choose to be great not big"
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoWe have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand. I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed. That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.
- TZubiri 1y agoThis is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby. But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot. To each their own I guess.
- bravesoul2 1y agoLol I agree. But I was thinking by "dont scale" to scratch my itch and never release it. That is more worthwhile now.
- overgard 1y agoNitpick, but having side projects you don’t plan to scale isn’t anything unique to the AI era
- sowbug 1y agoThe cost-benefit analysis has changed. It's now easier to build something indulgently complex -- something of larger scale than a "side project" -- for just a few people.
- legendofbrando 1y agoI think this is precisely right. Like 100% correct. No notes. Exactly nails it.
- tomasphan 1y agoThis is absolutely true and the reason I left a job in software consulting. The future is asking an LLM to write anything for you. It will figure out the tech stack, hosting, integrations etc. “I am looking for an alternative to Discord” is now “make me a Discord clone for my friends and I”. Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.
- 101008 1y agoI disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc. People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.
- jpgleeson 1y agoRobin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
- SamInTheShell 1y agoVibe coding isn’t going to net you horizontal scalability out of the box if you know nothing about scalable system architecture. These models have more examples of single node wonder codebases than they do for real world application of algorithms like Paxos or RAFT. That being said I let Claude Sonnet 4 eat my GHC premium creds a few weeks back to see if it could figure out multiraft in Go. The short answer is just no, without doing an entire refresher on where it went wrong. It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.
- aussieguy1234 1y agoI have a bunch of little projects that benefit me personally and professionally in a number of ways. I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me. Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.
- dented42 1y agoWas scaling ever the point?
- badlogic 1y agoGenuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue. I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically. [1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- uludag 1y agoI 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work. Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.
- mikewarot 1y agoThe LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use. Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription) The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible. Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM. All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal. Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)
- visarga 1y ago> Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Not if you have to stake your career on them. AI takes no liability, it is all yours
- hdgvhicv 1y agoThere’s no accountability in software, and in the tech industry people move jobs so fast they can simply blame the previous person and say they need to refactor the code to remove tech debt for a few years. Basically the three envelope situation.
- quitit 1y agoIn a way this is how AI can help us return to doing things for interest, pleasure or creativity. Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $. I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation. I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.
- mmmmbbbhb 1y agoIt's crazy that medium.com has an SSR hydration issue that just goes unfixed for years.
- wiradikusuma 1y agoWe can vibe code crazy stuff and this still a problem? I guess our job is safe :)
- deafpolygon 1y agoYou realize that as the amount of people vibe-coding goes up, the “quality” of the data llms are trained on are going to drop.