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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this space is just about to get really interesting. Historically when a craft/skill becomes automated it pushes that craft/skill to explore all those nooks and crannies which the automation can not reach, build around and exploit all those nooks and crannies, giving them a say over form and function. We are just starting to see this happen in software with AI.
- at first LLMs apply a penalty to development: it requires to explore new toolings for AI assisted coding, then select and get used to one of them, that might well end up being a transient solution. e.g. Cursor, to be replaced soon by Claude Code?
- new uncertainty about which feature to develop: if I can develop it, then anyone else surely can reverse engineer it easily and replicate it? This is quite unnerving.
This, for sure. A whole lot of things that would be too tedious or naive or ineffective will get tried, and a whole lot more people will have access to try ideas, I think things should get really fun and wild for a while.
We are definitely in a period of transition. The question (for me) is whether Indie developers will be able to make a living in the new world of an Internet dominated by a few massive corporations and their AI tools.
If I want a bespoke table crafted by a woodworker I need to pay material and labor costs and thus it ends up costing quite a lot more than grabbing one at IKEA.
Most people would agree that for many criteria the more expensive one would be better than the mass-produced one, and yet we've long passed the age of "ask a local woodworker or do it yourself".
Maybe software is the same and shareware and indie software was just an outlier in the first place. spend a month building it, then make free copies and try to sell (labor costs) / (copies) because no one would pay just the labor costs.
But now where does FLOSS software come into the picture, competing with indie software on price (free), often quality (sometimes best in show), less of a bus factor (traditionally small indie teams) and repairability (the source code is there).
So yeah, maybe call me pessimistic or jaded or just an asshole, but there's a reason I have earned money writing software for about 25 years and never even thought about making and selling an indie product because I never felt it was feasible. Happy for all the people for whom it has worked so far.
This is classic engineer trying to build a business. Indie software is more of a business than it is software. Everyone wants to do the easy part(coding/tech), nobody wants to relentlessly service customers and do marketing/distribution.
Coding is easy. Building a business is hard, whether indie or VC backed.
AI tools are shifting the story of indie app creation from needing the skill + time + interest to just needing the time + interest (spending the necessary time workshopping the process with AI).
So the simpler your app is, the less of the moat it has going forward.
Example: It was only a few years ago that I wanted a basic iOS app to remind me to do 100 pushups, 100 situps, etc. every day. I paid $5 for quite a crappy app that got the job done (it was comically slow somehow). I found the developer's twitter and he was one of those "I make money creating and selling 1000 apps" people.
Now making that kind of app is trivial with Claude Code without even launching Xcode. I've build at least five apps so far just for personal use.
So, on the other hand, another definition of "indie software" is on the cusp of explosion.
>> it is getting harder for small software vendors
I think maybe this trend will continue and not specifically for indie developers, but for all software vendors. If AI becomes capable of producing genuinely highquality software, competition will intensify, and the industry will start to resemble the music industry. Alternatively, AI may continue to generate software that is not necessarily high quality but is largely indistinguishable from competing products; in that case, the market for lemons dynamic will apply. In either scenario, the value of software will decline...
I think part of the disagreement is how “the golden age” is being defined.
If it meant building something decent, ranking on Google, and pushing a few ads, then yeah, that probably is over.But if it means a single person being able to explore ideas, iterate quickly, and build software closely tied to a real, lived problem, I’m not sure we’ve seen that era peak yet.
What seems to be shrinking is generic attention.
What seems to be growing is the number of specific problems that are now cheap enough to try solving.
That probably hurts copycat SaaS.
It might actually help people with strong taste and proximity to a niche.
Exactly this... I think there will be a golden age of excel replacement SaaS solutions with highly customized UX and workflows for vertical use cases. But, at the same time a lot more competition. Regardless, it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems.
i have the same feeling too. i think distribution has become particularly harder for new products. there is no reliable channel that does not need constant effort (social media), and others like ads have become unviable for low ticket items. i dont know what the solution is.
I can empathize with the author. I'm trying to get my first software business off the ground, and one of my moats was well, having written software. For 20 years. I know that writing software is a small part of a software business, but it was a differentiator. I'm still better off than a vibe-coder, but I think about that.
On the flip side, there's a story of an adventurous young couple who drove through the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. They reported an incident where the road dipped and was submerged in water. Local men were standing around ready, for a fee, to chuck rocks in the water. The rocks piled up so the travelers' tires were able to grip the bottom and they were able to proceed on their journey. After they passed through, they observed in their rear view mirror the men now removing the rocks so the next driver would also have to pay.
I think wishing AI away to keep my moat is like wanting to remove those rocks. It's human to look out for #1 but it's a kind of tragedy of the commons.
It's basically a blog post to plug links to author's (presumably) struggling projects.
The majority of established ISVs are perfectly fine and have long adapted to new realities, be that the existence of AI coding tools, subscription licensing or what have you.
The fundamental - making something to solve users' pain points - is still there and it's now easier than ever to go from identifying a niche to shipping a solution. If anything, the golden age is now.
There are pro factors too. For example, the subscription culture pushed by those big platforms has trained user to pay to get. This is a vast improvement compare to decades ago where most user will just download, trial, expire and pirate.
> But Google have done everything they can to raise bid prices and generally enshittify Adwords, so they can grab more and more of the value in every transaction.
Now days, a software that work as claimed and reasonably priced is already rated above-than-average quality.
The real problem here, is discovery.
The old tricks such as SEO and forum signature link etc are dead. If you need user, you need to stay with your user group, listen to what they want and make them happy. Then your user will talk about it elsewhere and that could generate traffic for you.
Online ADs on targeted platforms may also help. But all and all, it's no longer free and automatic.
When I saw the headline, I genuinely could not picture what could possibly be meant by "A Golden Age Of Software In Which We Currently Reside."
So, I suppose it means SaaS-as-viable-income-maker. Which, well -- I suppose is fine if you can do that, no individual hate. But honestly -- funny enough -- it's pretty equivalent to me in terms of what is going on in hip-hop.
Rappers are making less money and also the art is improving back to a state that it once was in.
The signal-to-noise ratio is going crazy. How do you stand out when there are 10x as many people trying to make the same buck as you? There is so much garbage being created, it's insane.
Or from a users perspective: Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?
A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.
We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
For example, you tell the AI you're looking to buy an apartment, show some options.
It'll spin up an interactive map with layers of prices, amenities, etc.
Ask it to warp the map projection to show walk-times to metro stations, and it's do that.
Ask it to add some sliders for price range, walk-distance, 'social class', etc.
Ask to book viewings and it'll spin up a calendar, and web form (if it needs more information from you), and then send emails or fill agency booking forms with that data.
All highly personalized, created for the moment, and potentially disposable.
For years the size of the market grew as more as more people came online. The competition also increased. But now it seems the competition is increasing while the market size is stagnating or even shrinking. By competition I mean everything competing for attention.
For me I care about the minutiae's of good software and AI slop produced software just has none of that. It takes experience to produce that and experience to understand how well something is crafted.
Granted it flies over the head of most people. They can't discern a well written website to a 15MB webpage with an 8K thumbnail.
Same applies to software. Margins, bevels, grouping, spacing, primary and secondary actions. Some see the difference. Some don't. You can't fake understanding of what you can't perceive exists.
I feel it's harder, I get clicks but no engagement.
I even have comments enabled on my Reddit ads and I don't even get ASCII wangs.
Nobody says my product is bad (or good), there's just silence.
Although with the aggressive way the AI bros are scraping my site I can imagine where all these alleged clicks are coming from.
It's a bad time when you're paying $1 a click and you still see Reddit's own ads way above yours. So it's not because they are filling space where they don't have real ads available. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.
It's a shift towards what was known to be indie software as personal software and what used to be products of big corporations as indie software. It remains to be seen how big corporations will adjust with their bigger inertia.
I don't use canned native OR web apps much anymore. What I do is load Google Antigravity and ask for a flutter app with specified screens and functionality then run on mobile, desktop or web. What I get is equivalent of old indie software, except I do not depend on anyone to add the next feature I decide I need. What changed is not the software, but the business model - profit vs in house necessity. Hopefully indie game companies can benefit from same upscaling to develop their ideas into AAA feel titles which are beyond my personal AI assisted coding ability?
As an indie software developer myself, I think that the most difficult part of the business is not writing the software but rather finding potential customers. That's why I have few worries about LLM slop. "If you build it, they will come" is a fantasy. Marketing will make or break you.
In my case, there are a couple of cliches that are actually true: it's a marathon, not a sprint, and it took me 5 years to become an "overnight success". Thus, the ability to code faster with AI is totally irrelevant to me. That's not going to help. There are a number of comments here claiming that LLMs are going to usher in a golden age of indie software, but I think that's just delusional. These people don't appear to know what it takes to establish an indie business.
I can't speak about the effectiveness of Google Adwords, like the article author did, because I rarely purchase paid advertising and rely mostly on word-of-mouth. That's worked out fairly well for me, but obviously that's not going to work for everyone.
I disagree with the author about one thing: "Mobile-based software is expected to be free or, at best, very cheap. So requires huge scale to make any decent return." I think App Store developers have to resist the race to the bottom. We can't make it up in volume like the BigCos. The biggest mistake of new indie devs—and I made this mistake myself years ago—is to price your apps too low. You need sustainable prices, and just ignore the people who complain that your price is too high. If they're complaining, that means they're interested! You might be able to pick up those customers eventually on Black Friday.
My personal "golden age" was 2024, my highest income ever. 2025 was decent but a down year, back down to around 2021 levels. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps the economy? But who knows.
You have to distinguish between two different versions of "indie" software. What the author is describing, small business products really heavily reliant on marketing and traffic to me don't even fall under that label. That's not indie software, that's just software.
I had a CS teacher in school who spent a lot of his free time on software for people who take part in pidgeon racing competitions. He spent a whole decade on this because he was interested in it and it did even net him enough money eventually to pay part of his house off. That kind of thing to me is indie software and whether that is viable has nothing to do with LLMs or the web or what have you, because it's genuinely niche and serves an authentic community of people and enthusiasts that no company cares about anyway.
If you're in that kind of space and you don't care about attention next week desperately you don't need to be worried about some random technology because it's about people anyway, you're just the guy or girl who happens to be able to write software to help out.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[dead]
I think this space is just about to get really interesting. Historically when a craft/skill becomes automated it pushes that craft/skill to explore all those nooks and crannies which the automation can not reach, build around and exploit all those nooks and crannies, giving them a say over form and function. We are just starting to see this happen in software with AI.
Somehow this comes to mind: https://taxheaven3000.com/
Well put. Certainly my case with https://nocodefunctions.com
- traffic is slightly but noticeably decreasing for the last year: https://public.nocodefunctions.com
- it pushes me to improve the design, the overall quality, explore new feature spaces: https://next.nocodefunctions.com
Also, I noticed:
- at first LLMs apply a penalty to development: it requires to explore new toolings for AI assisted coding, then select and get used to one of them, that might well end up being a transient solution. e.g. Cursor, to be replaced soon by Claude Code?
- new uncertainty about which feature to develop: if I can develop it, then anyone else surely can reverse engineer it easily and replicate it? This is quite unnerving.
This, for sure. A whole lot of things that would be too tedious or naive or ineffective will get tried, and a whole lot more people will have access to try ideas, I think things should get really fun and wild for a while.
We are definitely in a period of transition. The question (for me) is whether Indie developers will be able to make a living in the new world of an Internet dominated by a few massive corporations and their AI tools.
If I want a bespoke table crafted by a woodworker I need to pay material and labor costs and thus it ends up costing quite a lot more than grabbing one at IKEA.
Most people would agree that for many criteria the more expensive one would be better than the mass-produced one, and yet we've long passed the age of "ask a local woodworker or do it yourself".
Maybe software is the same and shareware and indie software was just an outlier in the first place. spend a month building it, then make free copies and try to sell (labor costs) / (copies) because no one would pay just the labor costs.
But now where does FLOSS software come into the picture, competing with indie software on price (free), often quality (sometimes best in show), less of a bus factor (traditionally small indie teams) and repairability (the source code is there).
So yeah, maybe call me pessimistic or jaded or just an asshole, but there's a reason I have earned money writing software for about 25 years and never even thought about making and selling an indie product because I never felt it was feasible. Happy for all the people for whom it has worked so far.
This is classic engineer trying to build a business. Indie software is more of a business than it is software. Everyone wants to do the easy part(coding/tech), nobody wants to relentlessly service customers and do marketing/distribution.
Coding is easy. Building a business is hard, whether indie or VC backed.
>This is classic engineer trying to build a business.
My business has been profitable for 20 straight years, so I can't be that terrible at it. ;0)
AI tools are shifting the story of indie app creation from needing the skill + time + interest to just needing the time + interest (spending the necessary time workshopping the process with AI).
So the simpler your app is, the less of the moat it has going forward.
Example: It was only a few years ago that I wanted a basic iOS app to remind me to do 100 pushups, 100 situps, etc. every day. I paid $5 for quite a crappy app that got the job done (it was comically slow somehow). I found the developer's twitter and he was one of those "I make money creating and selling 1000 apps" people.
Now making that kind of app is trivial with Claude Code without even launching Xcode. I've build at least five apps so far just for personal use.
So, on the other hand, another definition of "indie software" is on the cusp of explosion.
Couldn't have used a calendar app
I wanted simple per-exercise counters that step +10, and a notification at 5pm if I hadn't finished all of my exercises for the day.
The point is that at the time paying $5 was a good trade so I didn't have to dick around with software.
But now it's trivial to have an LLM build it to my spec, yet still barely dick around with the software side.
A lot of software is like this.
>> it is getting harder for small software vendors
I think maybe this trend will continue and not specifically for indie developers, but for all software vendors. If AI becomes capable of producing genuinely highquality software, competition will intensify, and the industry will start to resemble the music industry. Alternatively, AI may continue to generate software that is not necessarily high quality but is largely indistinguishable from competing products; in that case, the market for lemons dynamic will apply. In either scenario, the value of software will decline...
I think part of the disagreement is how “the golden age” is being defined.
If it meant building something decent, ranking on Google, and pushing a few ads, then yeah, that probably is over.But if it means a single person being able to explore ideas, iterate quickly, and build software closely tied to a real, lived problem, I’m not sure we’ve seen that era peak yet.
What seems to be shrinking is generic attention. What seems to be growing is the number of specific problems that are now cheap enough to try solving.
That probably hurts copycat SaaS. It might actually help people with strong taste and proximity to a niche.
Exactly this... I think there will be a golden age of excel replacement SaaS solutions with highly customized UX and workflows for vertical use cases. But, at the same time a lot more competition. Regardless, it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems.
>Regardless, it will be great for users / companies with these specific problems.
If they can ever find the solutions that exist for their specific problem.
i have the same feeling too. i think distribution has become particularly harder for new products. there is no reliable channel that does not need constant effort (social media), and others like ads have become unviable for low ticket items. i dont know what the solution is.
And social media only works for some types of products. Also social media doesn't come easy to old gits like myself.
I can empathize with the author. I'm trying to get my first software business off the ground, and one of my moats was well, having written software. For 20 years. I know that writing software is a small part of a software business, but it was a differentiator. I'm still better off than a vibe-coder, but I think about that.
On the flip side, there's a story of an adventurous young couple who drove through the Democratic Republic of Congo [1]. They reported an incident where the road dipped and was submerged in water. Local men were standing around ready, for a fee, to chuck rocks in the water. The rocks piled up so the travelers' tires were able to grip the bottom and they were able to proceed on their journey. After they passed through, they observed in their rear view mirror the men now removing the rocks so the next driver would also have to pay.
I think wishing AI away to keep my moat is like wanting to remove those rocks. It's human to look out for #1 but it's a kind of tragedy of the commons.
[1] https://geoff.greer.fm/congo/
It's basically a blog post to plug links to author's (presumably) struggling projects.
The majority of established ISVs are perfectly fine and have long adapted to new realities, be that the existence of AI coding tools, subscription licensing or what have you.
The fundamental - making something to solve users' pain points - is still there and it's now easier than ever to go from identifying a niche to shipping a solution. If anything, the golden age is now.
How has it got easier to identify niches?
If you iterate faster your discover the market faster.
If everyone else is also iterating faster then it is also going to be harder to get enough attention to validate your product.
Interested to hear whether other Indie software vendors feel that things are getting harder.
There are pro factors too. For example, the subscription culture pushed by those big platforms has trained user to pay to get. This is a vast improvement compare to decades ago where most user will just download, trial, expire and pirate.
> But Google have done everything they can to raise bid prices and generally enshittify Adwords, so they can grab more and more of the value in every transaction.
Now days, a software that work as claimed and reasonably priced is already rated above-than-average quality.
The real problem here, is discovery.
The old tricks such as SEO and forum signature link etc are dead. If you need user, you need to stay with your user group, listen to what they want and make them happy. Then your user will talk about it elsewhere and that could generate traffic for you.
Online ADs on targeted platforms may also help. But all and all, it's no longer free and automatic.
When I saw the headline, I genuinely could not picture what could possibly be meant by "A Golden Age Of Software In Which We Currently Reside."
So, I suppose it means SaaS-as-viable-income-maker. Which, well -- I suppose is fine if you can do that, no individual hate. But honestly -- funny enough -- it's pretty equivalent to me in terms of what is going on in hip-hop.
Rappers are making less money and also the art is improving back to a state that it once was in.
Seems like LLMs will actually help that as well.
The signal-to-noise ratio is going crazy. How do you stand out when there are 10x as many people trying to make the same buck as you? There is so much garbage being created, it's insane.
Or from a users perspective: Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?
A lot of what makes software complicated is that it has to serve thousands of users with different requirements at once. With AI on the other side, that's not something a user has to worry about, they can just let the AI spawn a much smaller special purpose tool that solves exactly the problem they are having.
We might be entering the age of disposable software, where software isn't a product, but just something your AI system produces temporarily in the background for the task at hand.
> Why bother looking for software that fits your purpose, when you can just let the AI write one from scratch that does?
Because the software a person makes will actually be good, and the one the AI makes will be garbage.
Even garbage software can make a business profitable.
Unfortunately.
This sounds like the future to me.
For example, you tell the AI you're looking to buy an apartment, show some options.
It'll spin up an interactive map with layers of prices, amenities, etc.
Ask it to warp the map projection to show walk-times to metro stations, and it's do that.
Ask it to add some sliders for price range, walk-distance, 'social class', etc.
Ask to book viewings and it'll spin up a calendar, and web form (if it needs more information from you), and then send emails or fill agency booking forms with that data.
All highly personalized, created for the moment, and potentially disposable.
For years the size of the market grew as more as more people came online. The competition also increased. But now it seems the competition is increasing while the market size is stagnating or even shrinking. By competition I mean everything competing for attention.
Its been over for well over a decade tbh
No, it’s just getting started!
For me I care about the minutiae's of good software and AI slop produced software just has none of that. It takes experience to produce that and experience to understand how well something is crafted.
Granted it flies over the head of most people. They can't discern a well written website to a 15MB webpage with an 8K thumbnail.
Same applies to software. Margins, bevels, grouping, spacing, primary and secondary actions. Some see the difference. Some don't. You can't fake understanding of what you can't perceive exists.
You can't know what you don't know.
I feel it's harder, I get clicks but no engagement.
I even have comments enabled on my Reddit ads and I don't even get ASCII wangs.
Nobody says my product is bad (or good), there's just silence.
Although with the aggressive way the AI bros are scraping my site I can imagine where all these alleged clicks are coming from.
It's a bad time when you're paying $1 a click and you still see Reddit's own ads way above yours. So it's not because they are filling space where they don't have real ads available. It makes you feel like they run their own ads to jack up the price.
You might find this interesting:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
It's a shift towards what was known to be indie software as personal software and what used to be products of big corporations as indie software. It remains to be seen how big corporations will adjust with their bigger inertia.
I don't use canned native OR web apps much anymore. What I do is load Google Antigravity and ask for a flutter app with specified screens and functionality then run on mobile, desktop or web. What I get is equivalent of old indie software, except I do not depend on anyone to add the next feature I decide I need. What changed is not the software, but the business model - profit vs in house necessity. Hopefully indie game companies can benefit from same upscaling to develop their ideas into AAA feel titles which are beyond my personal AI assisted coding ability?
As an indie software developer myself, I think that the most difficult part of the business is not writing the software but rather finding potential customers. That's why I have few worries about LLM slop. "If you build it, they will come" is a fantasy. Marketing will make or break you.
In my case, there are a couple of cliches that are actually true: it's a marathon, not a sprint, and it took me 5 years to become an "overnight success". Thus, the ability to code faster with AI is totally irrelevant to me. That's not going to help. There are a number of comments here claiming that LLMs are going to usher in a golden age of indie software, but I think that's just delusional. These people don't appear to know what it takes to establish an indie business.
I can't speak about the effectiveness of Google Adwords, like the article author did, because I rarely purchase paid advertising and rely mostly on word-of-mouth. That's worked out fairly well for me, but obviously that's not going to work for everyone.
I disagree with the author about one thing: "Mobile-based software is expected to be free or, at best, very cheap. So requires huge scale to make any decent return." I think App Store developers have to resist the race to the bottom. We can't make it up in volume like the BigCos. The biggest mistake of new indie devs—and I made this mistake myself years ago—is to price your apps too low. You need sustainable prices, and just ignore the people who complain that your price is too high. If they're complaining, that means they're interested! You might be able to pick up those customers eventually on Black Friday.
My personal "golden age" was 2024, my highest income ever. 2025 was decent but a down year, back down to around 2021 levels. I'm not quite sure why, perhaps the economy? But who knows.
You need to have a fair amount of customers before 'word of mouth' becomes a viable strategy.
You have to distinguish between two different versions of "indie" software. What the author is describing, small business products really heavily reliant on marketing and traffic to me don't even fall under that label. That's not indie software, that's just software.
I had a CS teacher in school who spent a lot of his free time on software for people who take part in pidgeon racing competitions. He spent a whole decade on this because he was interested in it and it did even net him enough money eventually to pay part of his house off. That kind of thing to me is indie software and whether that is viable has nothing to do with LLMs or the web or what have you, because it's genuinely niche and serves an authentic community of people and enthusiasts that no company cares about anyway.
If you're in that kind of space and you don't care about attention next week desperately you don't need to be worried about some random technology because it's about people anyway, you're just the guy or girl who happens to be able to write software to help out.
> "I had a CS teacher in school who spent a lot of his free time on software for people who take part in pidgeon racing competitions."
Fascinating! Do you have a link, or at least a name?