4 ms·
Ask HN: What are independent software contractors doing now?
The amount of opportunities I've found doing independent contracting for people in the last year or two has went from easily being able to find one or two leads a week to none at all for several months.
It seems with AI people are just not willing to hire devs for their pet projects anymore?
- jeansilga 2mo ago[dead]
- codingdave 2mo agoLegacy tech work. I get almost no calls for modern dev stacks, but I'm kept as busy fixing and modernizing legacy apps on legacy stacks, and helping to get their data moved to a modern environment. I'm not drowning in calls or anything - but they come in often enough to keep me working.
- gtirloni 2mo agoYou could say not-well-disciplined vibe-coded projects are in the same bucket as legacy apps from day 1, right?
- codingdave 2mo agoHonestly, no - vibe coded projects that aren't done well never launch. So if you ever reach a "Day 1", you did well enough that you can probably roll with it for a couple years before you need a rescue. And if your business survives those couple years, it means you've hit the market correctly, which should then be able to fund a project to re-architect for sustainability. Also, vibe coded apps are almost by definition something that an AI can iterate on because it came from an LLM in the first place. Legacy apps tend to exclude LLM-based assistance because the models' training is insufficient on obscure ancient tech stacks.
- unified101 2mo agoIndustry shift worth noting seems to be "If AI can do it, I don't need you". So all work available is - I can't get AI to do this. Help me do it.
- tmpsvc2695f5 2mo ago[dead]
- andrevalleee 2mo ago[flagged]
- gtirloni 2mo agoFixing vibe coded projects? Arguably requires more knowledge than building the usual CRUD app.
- kypro 2mo ago> It seems with AI people are just not willing to hire devs for their pet projects anymore? Not willing? Genuinely why would I? A dev is going to cost more, work slower and be less likely to give me exactly what I ask for. I don't mean to be blunt, but you need to look for something else to do imo. This isn't 2016.
- Madmallard 2mo agoWhy would a dev be less likely to give you exactly what you ask for lmao that's completely wrong
- kypro 2mo agoMaybe like 50% can do a decent job... Either way, not sure why you would pay a dev over getting a Claude subscription.
- Madmallard 1mo agoBecause it's more reliable? They can use Claude better than you can for that matter
- farseer 2mo agoOff-topic but is there any independent study that has documented impact of AI on contractual work for software devs?