4 ms·

The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 sid

The issue is that before AI, 1% of the population was capable of creating 1 side project per year. After AI, 10% of the population is capable of creating 10 side projects per year. The competition grew by 100x. The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking.

kcmastrpc 8mo ago
I can relate. Sincerely debating whether I quit my well-paying and comfortable corporate job and just go full-time entrepreneur before the opportunities disappear.
o_m 8mo ago
I think we need to change our perspective of what success is. I believe there will be a ton of small companies popping up instead of a few big ones that eats everyone's lunch. Like Google, Microsoft and others giants have done until now.
- layer8 8mo ago
  The big ones are successful based on vendor lock-in, network effects, and regulatory capture. AI doesn’t change that dramatically.
hypfer 8mo ago
No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't mean that no one plays chess anymore at home.
- ihaveajob 8mo ago
  Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.
  - hypfer 8mo ago
    I mean I would too be concerned if such a major event _wouldn't_ make people question their assumptions/beliefs/ideas/visions. If you have no reaction at all, you probably weren't paying attention. Eventually though, people _should_ recover and return after having processed the changes. So maybe the professor was still recovering at the time?
    - ihaveajob 8mo ago
      It's possible. At that time people were talking about Go as the next frontier (that didn't last long). IMO, the game is the same, and for 99.9999% of folks who ever play it, whether a computer can beat the best human is irrelevant in how fun it is to play.
  - FpUser 8mo ago
    In that sense running competition is no longer interesting since I can jut ride in the car
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.
  - hypfer 8mo ago
    Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place? This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.
    - ipaddr 8mo ago
      It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
      - amelius 8mo ago
        Yeah but we've told ourselves that writing software was some kind of higher mathematics, where in reality it was mostly just plumbing that, surprise, a computer can do too.
      - hypfer 8mo ago
        > It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? Yes. > The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software. No. The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift. This remains unchanged. The driving force of FOSS is not "how can I fix someone else's problem". It never has been. Well.. maybe on HN it was different, but that's not "the open source ecosystem". And, yes, maybe some corps have gaslit naive people into believing that they must donate their lives to said corps.
samiv 8mo ago
It's like the business of selling electric drills. People don't really want drills they want holes. But holes are difficult to sell so the selling the drills is a proxy for that. In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service). You could argue that in either case the proxy is not what people want but yet because of the difficulty of selling the "actual" thing the proxy market has flourished. We're now inventing a new tool that will completely disrupt that market and any software business that is predicated on the complexity required to create the software to transform the data is going to get severely disrupted. Software itself will be worthless.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  Software is not becoming worthless. The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules. What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode. Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.
  - samiv 8mo ago
    Software is just means to an end. Data and data transformation is what people want. Software has sellable dollar value only because creating the software to do the data transformation has had real associated cost. I.e anyone who wanted a particular data transformation had to pay to get the software that does it. When you drive down that cost you drive down the potential value of the software products. Remember that what is a cost to one party is revenue to the other party. Without revenue there cannot be profit and without revenue software has no dollar value. If anyone can create "photoshop" with minimal cost and there are thousands of said "photoshop" apps what will be the retail sell value of those apps. Close to zero. This same lifecycle already happened with games. Driving down the cost of producing games resulted in a proliferation of games that are mostly worthless that you can't even give away.
fuzzy2 8mo ago
Maybe, but LLMs solve but one issue (maybe two). Take me, for example. I am highly proficient regarding software development in most aspects. Except for that tiny problem: I wouldn't even know what to build. And at least for me, LLMs could not help with that. The whole side project or even private project thing doesn't just hinge on being able to produce software. There's a lot more.
rapind 8mo ago
Yes it become much easier to fail fast and iterate, but also a lot of these fail fast projects are trivial for anyone to implement themselves. Differentiating your project is going to be tougher too. A lot of the moats are gone, but quality (and security) is in a nose dive. AI built project might be the Ikea furniture. Good for the masses, but there's still a market (much smaller) for well crafted applications and services. It's hard to say what it'll look like in a couples years though. Maybe even the crafting is eventually gone. /shrug
ehnto 8mo ago
Are most side projects in competition? I wouldn't think so. Even if they were I disagree that 10x more ideas being produced means 10x more products in competition. You could leverage AI to execute but still have terrible ideas, leadership, product stewardship etc. I think some clever people with a real and valuable insight will finally be able to turn that insight into a product. I also think the other 9 products will be get rich quick attempts by people with nothing to offer.
ramesh31 8mo ago
The game is all about content now. Forget software. Games, movies, books, music, etc. Things that people will always want regardless of how much there already is. Look at the success of AI slop authors and YouTube channels. That's our future.
claytongulick 8mo ago
I think the window of opportunity to create boring also-ran software is shrinking. I think there's more opportunity to do something novel. AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.
gilbetron 8mo ago
But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs. No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it. Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.
kevinsync 8mo ago
> The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking. Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. It's like architecture, there are always improvements in materials, tools and processes, and Claude and Codex can provide more laborers for almost free, but most people are still gonna be building uninspired McMansions instead of the Guggenheim. [0] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=112 https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=112 [1] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=160 https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=160
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  Disagree. Ideas were a necessary component of the one project I had success with. BTW, the line between ideas and execution is blurred. Is coming up with innovative UI and features ideas or execution?
  - necovek 8mo ago
    Ideas are obviously a prerequisite, but they aren't "worth anything" because there is so many of them and without them being executed well (or sometimes, executed at all), they don't really bring any value. So really, they are comparatively cheap. I, for one, have hundreds of ideas, but always lacked the time to execute on 5% of them.
    - RivieraKid 8mo ago
      Good ideas (and the ability to recognize them) are very valuable in my opinion. It also depends on what you mean by an idea: - A todo app better than the existing ones - A todo app with these 3 features - A todo app with these 3 features, here's how the UI would look I have tens of ideas, but maybe 1 - 3 that I believe have a meaningful chance to become successful and generate income ($20k annually or more) with great execution. I find it hard to come up with ideas that have a fairly clear path to success and can generate income.
zozbot234 8mo ago
If the competition just grew by 100x, where's all the great, high-quality, AI-vibe coded side products? Something just isn't adding up here. Could it be that vibe coding on its own just isn't all that useful, and most of those 10% are wasting their time?
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  The counterpoint is that it's only 2 months since AI got really useful and it will presumably continue to improve. It takes a while until it spreads through the society.

kcmastrpc 8mo ago

I can relate. Sincerely debating whether I quit my well-paying and comfortable corporate job and just go full-time entrepreneur before the opportunities disappear.

o_m 8mo ago

I think we need to change our perspective of what success is. I believe there will be a ton of small companies popping up instead of a few big ones that eats everyone's lunch. Like Google, Microsoft and others giants have done until now.

layer8 8mo ago
The big ones are successful based on vendor lock-in, network effects, and regulatory capture. AI doesn’t change that dramatically.

hypfer 8mo ago

No, why? Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do? Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself. Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun. Just because there are chess computers, doesn't mean that no one plays chess anymore at home.

ihaveajob 8mo ago
Ironically I had a very smart and otherwise reasonable math professor who, shortly after Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, said in class that chess was no longer interesting.
- hypfer 8mo ago
  I mean I would too be concerned if such a major event _wouldn't_ make people question their assumptions/beliefs/ideas/visions. If you have no reaction at all, you probably weren't paying attention. Eventually though, people _should_ recover and return after having processed the changes. So maybe the professor was still recovering at the time?
  - ihaveajob 8mo ago
    It's possible. At that time people were talking about Go as the next frontier (that didn't last long). IMO, the game is the same, and for 99.9999% of folks who ever play it, whether a computer can beat the best human is irrelevant in how fun it is to play.
- FpUser 8mo ago
  In that sense running competition is no longer interesting since I can jut ride in the car
RivieraKid 8mo ago
Isn't it obvious? The reward that a personal project can generate for you is limited. It's not remotely close to what a successful project would give you - money, fulfillment, social capital, feeling good about yourself, etc.
- hypfer 8mo ago
  Yes but you see, maybe all of that was wrong in the first place? This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.
  - ipaddr 8mo ago
    It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
    - amelius 8mo ago
      Yeah but we've told ourselves that writing software was some kind of higher mathematics, where in reality it was mostly just plumbing that, surprise, a computer can do too.
    - hypfer 8mo ago
      > It was wrong to write software you hoped others would use? Yes. > The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software. No. The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift. This remains unchanged. The driving force of FOSS is not "how can I fix someone else's problem". It never has been. Well.. maybe on HN it was different, but that's not "the open source ecosystem". And, yes, maybe some corps have gaslit naive people into believing that they must donate their lives to said corps.

samiv 8mo ago

It's like the business of selling electric drills. People don't really want drills they want holes. But holes are difficult to sell so the selling the drills is a proxy for that. In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service). You could argue that in either case the proxy is not what people want but yet because of the difficulty of selling the "actual" thing the proxy market has flourished. We're now inventing a new tool that will completely disrupt that market and any software business that is predicated on the complexity required to create the software to transform the data is going to get severely disrupted. Software itself will be worthless.

skydhash 8mo ago
Software is not becoming worthless. The value of computers since its inception was that it's capable of transforming data very, very fast and autonomously. But someone has to input that data from the real world or capture it using some device, and someone has to write the rules. What happened is that we created a whole world of information and the rules has become very complex. Now we have multiple layers stacked vertically and multiple domains spread horizontally. At one time, ASCII was enough, now we have to deal with Unicode. Software becoming worthless will mean that everyone has learned the rules of the systems we created and capable of creating systems with good enough quality. I'm not seeing that happens anytime soon.
- samiv 8mo ago
  Software is just means to an end. Data and data transformation is what people want. Software has sellable dollar value only because creating the software to do the data transformation has had real associated cost. I.e anyone who wanted a particular data transformation had to pay to get the software that does it. When you drive down that cost you drive down the potential value of the software products. Remember that what is a cost to one party is revenue to the other party. Without revenue there cannot be profit and without revenue software has no dollar value. If anyone can create "photoshop" with minimal cost and there are thousands of said "photoshop" apps what will be the retail sell value of those apps. Close to zero. This same lifecycle already happened with games. Driving down the cost of producing games resulted in a proliferation of games that are mostly worthless that you can't even give away.

fuzzy2 8mo ago

Maybe, but LLMs solve but one issue (maybe two). Take me, for example. I am highly proficient regarding software development in most aspects. Except for that tiny problem: I wouldn't even know what to build. And at least for me, LLMs could not help with that. The whole side project or even private project thing doesn't just hinge on being able to produce software. There's a lot more.

rapind 8mo ago

Yes it become much easier to fail fast and iterate, but also a lot of these fail fast projects are trivial for anyone to implement themselves. Differentiating your project is going to be tougher too. A lot of the moats are gone, but quality (and security) is in a nose dive. AI built project might be the Ikea furniture. Good for the masses, but there's still a market (much smaller) for well crafted applications and services. It's hard to say what it'll look like in a couples years though. Maybe even the crafting is eventually gone. /shrug

ehnto 8mo ago

Are most side projects in competition? I wouldn't think so. Even if they were I disagree that 10x more ideas being produced means 10x more products in competition. You could leverage AI to execute but still have terrible ideas, leadership, product stewardship etc. I think some clever people with a real and valuable insight will finally be able to turn that insight into a product. I also think the other 9 products will be get rich quick attempts by people with nothing to offer.

ramesh31 8mo ago

The game is all about content now. Forget software. Games, movies, books, music, etc. Things that people will always want regardless of how much there already is. Look at the success of AI slop authors and YouTube channels. That's our future.

claytongulick 8mo ago

I think the window of opportunity to create boring also-ran software is shrinking. I think there's more opportunity to do something novel. AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.

gilbetron 8mo ago

But the total market size (in number of products) also multiplied. For instance, as a relatively tiny example, I create a nutrition tracker. There's hundreds already out there, but they never met my specific desire for one. So I created one with Claude (took maybe 2 hours total over a few days) that completely matches my desire, plus I can tweak it as want for my needs. No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it. Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.

kevinsync 8mo ago

> The pessimist in me thinks that the window of opportunity to create something successful is shrinking. Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. It's like architecture, there are always improvements in materials, tools and processes, and Claude and Codex can provide more laborers for almost free, but most people are still gonna be building uninspired McMansions instead of the Guggenheim. [0] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=112 https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=112 [1] https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=160 https://youtu.be/YYkj2yYaGtU?t=160

RivieraKid 8mo ago
Disagree. Ideas were a necessary component of the one project I had success with. BTW, the line between ideas and execution is blurred. Is coming up with innovative UI and features ideas or execution?
- necovek 8mo ago
  Ideas are obviously a prerequisite, but they aren't "worth anything" because there is so many of them and without them being executed well (or sometimes, executed at all), they don't really bring any value. So really, they are comparatively cheap. I, for one, have hundreds of ideas, but always lacked the time to execute on 5% of them.
  - RivieraKid 8mo ago
    Good ideas (and the ability to recognize them) are very valuable in my opinion. It also depends on what you mean by an idea: - A todo app better than the existing ones - A todo app with these 3 features - A todo app with these 3 features, here's how the UI would look I have tens of ideas, but maybe 1 - 3 that I believe have a meaningful chance to become successful and generate income ($20k annually or more) with great execution. I find it hard to come up with ideas that have a fairly clear path to success and can generate income.

zozbot234 8mo ago

If the competition just grew by 100x, where's all the great, high-quality, AI-vibe coded side products? Something just isn't adding up here. Could it be that vibe coding on its own just isn't all that useful, and most of those 10% are wasting their time?

RivieraKid 8mo ago
The counterpoint is that it's only 2 months since AI got really useful and it will presumably continue to improve. It takes a while until it spreads through the society.