That has also kind of removed my interest in side projects too, because there is probably no more chance of making any money from them, unless you are good at marketing.
What is the opinion here?
I see a torrent of poor ideas made a reality without enough thought put into them, designed without taste, and built without quality by people without the experience to maintain them.
You will do far better if you’re out there, talking to potential or current customers, understanding their needs deeply, and solving them.
It very much pays to be a solo dev, but you have to be very “heads up” and spend more time with humans. IMO it’ll difficult to get by just as a heads down pure dev.
Finally LLMs don’t know everything. Even if they knew everything, they don’t know your clients full situation. Moreover your client wants your specific n=1 opinions/experiences, not whatever average of ideas lives in the LLM.
Know your industries business well. You’ll do well coaching clients not just on the tech, but the intersection of tech and the gaming business. If you’re in a position you could critique an LLM on a topic, or offer a different perspective, that has strong market value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
Everyone is talking about how many things they are building. Non-devs suddenly building... But nobody seems to call out the basic law of supply and demand.
You can be the greatest marketer but you will fail when all channels are flooded. Thinking your "taste" will save you is a false fallacy, most mainstream products suck and people still buy them. There's not an infinite demand for software.
It will eventually settle in some new market configuration. However devs shouldn't have broken their market by letting everyone in, was a stupid professional move.
Imagine saying this about a great record album in music. Or any masterwork of art.
From growing up with my young brain being programmed by surrealist MTV videos, in a society driven by tiktok brains, creativity will be at an absolute premium.
Just the idea that this is a bad time for the solo developer is so uncreative that it boggles my mind but it is hardly surprising.
Those times were always pretty brief, and those markets were quickly saturated by people looking to make it rich. It was certainly not the state of anything in the years leading up to agentic coding.
Directing the AI and using it to learn from is good.
Still, ideas about AI are currently ruining all sorts of markets (and being used as an excuse to lay off huge amounts of people, who then aren't going to be customers).
You can (possibly) do more now or do new things now.
(And AI is also disrupting marketing if that makes you feel any better.)
It was already the case that the hardest part of a project was getting people interested enough that they invest time into trying it.
But now, the fight to get people's attention on new projects is going to get an awful lot harder, as the barrier to entry dropped,and that people who are actually good at marketing can make apps themselves.
Otherwise, as a solo dev, you can leverage AI for both coding faster, and getting better at marketing.
Instead of programmers having to look for people with real world experiences to apply their skills to.
I've made things with Claude I wouldn't begin to do on my own.
Okay I've not made any money out of it, surely you always needed to be good at marketing. Or did you mean advertising?