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In my experience, the golden age of indie software is about to begin. LLMs and coding agents will make building vertical and niche software much more cost effective.

In the last 3 months, I’ve built and launched a SaaS app to help my sister manage her florist business, and already have other paying customers. Without LLMs, this would have never been feasible because of dev time and/or costs.

7 comments

> Without LLMs, this would have never been feasible because of dev time and/or costs.

This implies that the ultimate payoff will be quite small, doesn't it? I would think that a "golden age" requires gold, so to speak. A lucrative software business should eventually return profits after costs in the long run.

To me, it doesn't sound like a golden age if the idea is just to break even on development.

Are we just talking about a hobby here, or about becoming a professional indie software developer? Those are two vastly different outcomes. If you can't quit your day job, I wouldn't call it a golden age.

In another comment you said, "it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46360019 But this seems to be changing the subject. The article author is a software developer trying to make a living. A golden age for florists, for example, is not necessarily a golden age for indie software developers.

I agree. As seen in other comments as well, it’s an engineer’s instinct to believe that producing more creates more value. In reality, value is determined by scarcity and usefulness, not output alone.

This. Companies are chomping at the bits about developer productivity and how they can do 10x more. What is not clear even if they can fire 90% of their engineers (assuming the 10x productivity gain is real), how are they expecting that even a tiny sliver of that 90% cannot replicate the products - with AI? And if we are in such a world how are those companies' valuations justified any more?

I am really excited at indie software again!

I agree with this take, if anything the Enterprise corporations probably have more to fear than Indie software developers.

You just named all reasons why it is over

What, because it only takes three months to build a SaaS for a florist?

If it took 12 months to build a SaaS for a florist nobody would build a SaaS for a florist.

Yeah exactly. It is basically a commodity at this point - and in commodities margins are like 3% and there is nothing you can compete on except price - which becomes a race to the bottom. And there is no booming industry where this is the case.

Of course, saas for florists does exist https://www.strelitziasoftware.com/our-story/

But still you can compete on prize or provide proper localization. In your link they share the are based in UK and available in 7 countries. Something that took half a year and a few devs now it can be done by one indie in 1 month living in cheaper country and charging 1/5th and still be happy about it.

How ever will humanity survive without vibe coded florist SaaS

All that matters if the florists are happy with it -- extrapolate that to humanity as you wish.

You may as well have just not left a comment because that means absolutely nothing in this discussion

Humanity will clearly also survive without cars and shoes. What's your point?

Yes because the societal benefit of vibe coded florist SaaS is directly comparable to the societal benefit of cars and shoes. Great argument.

Yup, I echo this sentiment. We're about to flourish.

It's never been cheaper and easier to build real value. It's also never been cheaper and easier to build real crap–but, the indie devs who care will build more value with higher velocity and independence. And good indie development will come with it an air of quality that the larger crap will struggle to compete with (at the edges). Not that they'll care, because the big players be making more money off the entrenched behemoths.

But as an indie dev, your incentive structures are far different and far more manageable.

Betteridge's law applies here – if the author truly believed the thesis, they would have declared it as a statement rather than a question.

The author only has limited amount of data to go on, so can't really make a definitive statement that covers Indie developers in general.

I agree.

There's such an opportunity for people to actually explore ideas whose prototyping cost would have been too high with both time/money to not be worth it earlier.

And even outside that perspective, there's a lot of broken corpo software now. The indie hackers are fighting back. See Helium by imputnet, for example. Ghostty by the revered Mitchell Hashimoto is another example of something I daily and is relatively indie.

Corpo-slop seems to be enshittifying at an exponential rate due to decision paralysis and general management talent decay.

No the big players will just consume what any indie puts out and spit out something better.

For some value of 'better'.

Is Mcdonalds better than the mom and pop shop that got displaced 30 years ago?

For me: no. For the suits: yes.

> Is Mcdonalds better than the mom and pop shop that got displaced 30 years ago?

In some cases yes, other wise why would they make billions of dollars?