You focused largely on the promotional aspect, though I think the product competition angle is more interesting.
The other day I saw someone famous(ish) announce a new desktop application, to meaningful reception.
Thirty minutes later I had the same application, in every meaningful way. Built, working, ready for distribution.
It was just a test and I’m not about to sell it, but I can’t see how this doesn’t come down hard on indie developers.
This example produced reasonably done swift using appropriate system libs… so while “slop” will be a thing people might ignore for now, I think the bar has to go way, way up for real developers.
saulpw 17 days ago [-]
I don't see how you could verify "same application in every meaningful way" inside of 30 minutes. Even if the other fellow just vibed it up like you did, him caring about the product and doing thoughtful QA and actually using the application and making little tweaks and staking his reputation on it and committing to its ongoing maintenance is what matters. You may even have an identical application at the end of the day but I'll pay $20 for one that I'm better able to trust.
dd8601fn 17 days ago [-]
> I don't see how you could verify "same application in every meaningful way" inside of 30 minutes.
That was not difficult. Though obviously I wouldn’t declare it so and actually ship it to paying people in 30 minutes.
As for the rest of your point, that’s certainly going to be a fair assessment, much of the time, for now.
But that wasn’t really the point. We’re already pretty close to being there on “just tell the machine what you want” for huge swaths of non-critical software. And I don’t think pressure from that is going to let up.
hermitcrab 17 days ago [-]
>You focused largely on the promotional aspect, though I think the product competition angle is more interesting.
They are linked. LLMs mean reduced barriers and more competition, which makes promotion harder.
williamsss 14 days ago [-]
As someone who took years investing in a system to easily spin up indie projects before vibe coding was coined. It’s been crushing to have built quality projects that are now swallowed up by a tidal wave of AI slop.
It may or may not be a great time to be a popular indie dev, but for the less known folks - it’s a lottery
jesse__ 18 days ago [-]
"surfing is not a sport, it's a way of life"
Agreed friend
Also, "it takes five years to become an overnight success" is a fantastic line.
Great read
diskzero 17 days ago [-]
"It takes five years to become an overnight success" I heard a variation of this from a VC who invested in my startup in the 8Os. I had to use it on him when we went back to the well a few times for more funding.
frizlab 17 days ago [-]
why did you put a captial o instead of a 0 for the 80s?
dzonga 17 days ago [-]
the software engineering profession seems to be one of the few professions that doesn't reward 20+ year professionals. with doctors, lawyers etc - your value goes up past 40.
but in software engineering with ageism - your value "goes down". when it should be the reverse if you're an IC.
so yeah going your own way as quick as possible - is not insurance for your sanity but income too.
is it easy no, but worth it.
mintflow 18 days ago [-]
Thanks for the frankly sharing of the journey, being in the same boat, after two years of not-worth-to-mention revenue from appstore, it seems start to get on track a bit now
I think I am not the lucky one to get overnight success and like in the post get the lucky time on iOS 15 release
Being writing a long article to record my indie app developper journey, Hope I can read in calm of it one decade later
jdw64 17 days ago [-]
As an indie software maker, I agree. I've been thinking about this a lot too. I'm going to start by polishing my indieweb site first. A site needs to look decent to be trustworthy.
dgellow 17 days ago [-]
In 2026 a site should not look made by Claude to feel trustworthy, IMHO
Melonai 17 days ago [-]
I feel the same. I've always had this feeling about sites, but the recent year or so has really defined it for me: Sites that have the polished, glowing, glossy aesthetic are way less trustworthy to me than simple indieweb sites with some basic CSS. It's the same principle people have noted about seeing typos in text making it more human-like. Of course, Claude can make sites that have an indieweb vibe, but it takes deliberate prompting, while the default is the fancy 2020 SaaS startup aesthetic, which I see everywhere now. It's almost an inversion of felt effort.
jdw64 17 days ago [-]
Does it look like Claude made it? It was actually made from a template I used 5 years ago. The world never stops surprising me.
dgellow 17 days ago [-]
It doesn’t, no, I reacted to your comment, not your website :)
jdw64 17 days ago [-]
Ah, I see. These days, there's a trend of calling everything AI slop, so I agree with you. That's why I've been hesitant to use Bootstrap templates lately. even though they used to be considered pretty reliable
mikeaskew4 18 days ago [-]
If you’re fortunate to have the chance, do it and don’t look back.
202508042147 18 days ago [-]
I had the fortune and grit to build and release something on my own. It took years and a lot of pain. Then came the pain of supporting it in production. I generally regret putting myself through this and I do look back. I do think it is worth trying something, but you need to be careful what exactly you are building. Too many times I got lost in details or spent way too much time on things that were not worth it. Also, giving up sooner when you see it doesn't work can be a good thing.
mattlondon 17 days ago [-]
+1 I did a few android apps in the goldrush years and building the app was the easy part, and this was before Claude code.
The hard part was the customer and technical support. Huge time and energy sink fielding those requests - some totally lucid and well written, some incomprehensible, some just kinda sketchy obviously looking to manipulate/exploit/whatever you, some from people using phones and software versions you've never heard of, some from people using a totally different app than yours, some who think you are Google/apple/Microsoft and please reset their password to hunter2 etc etc etc. Then you have the endless API churn and mandates from the app stores etc about what you can and can't do, what SDK needs updating for whatever, new requirements, new deprecations etc etc etc.
It was maybe 10% coding and building something, with the other 90% just dealing with "customer service" bullshit that gained you basically nothing (and certainly not making you any revenue).
I made some small time hobby money, but obviously I pulled all the apps eventually and never looked back really. I would not recommend doing this to anyone if you have a stable job that pays reasonably well already. Keep the day job, it's less hassle.
socalgal2 17 days ago [-]
We need more of these stories. A week or two ago game engines came up where I see so many wanna-be indie devs effectively throw away their chance at shipping before running out of money by spending time making an engine instead of getting to the game by using an existing one. The comments were generally "so what if they had fun". My reply should have been "it would be nicer to have shipped and kept the fun going longer than not ship because of wasted time and therefore have to give up the dream"
nullpoint420 17 days ago [-]
what if the fun for them is the game engine? because game devs are customers too, it's technical product dev.
socalgal2 17 days ago [-]
their stated goal is to become a self-sustaining indie game dev. They fail because instead of shipping a game they spent time making an engine and then running out of funds an having to get job not making their own stuff.
If their stated goal was to make a game engine then sure. That wasn't their stated goal.
nullpoint420 7 days ago [-]
i see. thanks for the context.
18 days ago [-]
18 days ago [-]
codemog 18 days ago [-]
If you have the balls to create and release something, you’re a legend. Don’t be a corporate NPC trying to look like the smartest person in the meeting and optimizing some stupid KPI for your next promotion packet. Life’s far too short. Save me the cliche rebuttals too, I’ve already heard them.
khriss 18 days ago [-]
Yeah, but for most people, the paycheck from being a 'corporate NPC' is a profound and unbeatable argument.
Rent is due every month and stores don't accept personal IOUs....
dgellow 17 days ago [-]
Aren’t you all paid really well in the US? (I assume you’re in the US, given the general audience of this website)
I would be really surprised if the majority of HN audience didn’t have decent savings, unless SF is really as expensive as people say online?
khriss 17 days ago [-]
Whatever savings you have, you still need to contend with the reality that the US has no real social safety net and it's expensive, esp since the last few years. You are always potentially one doctors visit away from bankruptcy without insurance, and the social safety programs like Medicare and social security only kick in after 65.
The truth is, an overwhelming majority of people in the US live a very precarious life financially speaking. No doubt the US as a whole is a very rich country, but to paraphrase William Gibson, the money is there, just not evenly distributed.
_dark_matter_ 18 days ago [-]
How is this the most upvoted comment? I get great joy out of being a great engineer at work. I LOVE solving hard problems and helping people. People at work using my tools or reading my documents brings me joy.
You can do this and release things! Do both!
atomicnumber3 18 days ago [-]
Because ultimately a lot of corpo tech is ads bullshit or not nearly far enough from it.
Or it's healthcare bs. And not the cool kind where you help people (tremendous respect for doctors and nurses). The bs kind where you make it slightly more efficient to bill them into bankruptcy.
Or it's generic SaaS which is more or less the most you can hope to get to work on. (It's where I am).
Then there's reams of poorly paid positions where you software mill excel-adjacent LOB apps.
I agree with the sentiment of parent comment. Corporate programming sucks. If you have the opportunity to not be alienated from the product of your labor, do it.
18 days ago [-]
jopsen 17 days ago [-]
> Corporate NPC
That's a really good description, I should update my linkedin profile :)
alentred 17 days ago [-]
You do realize that there is a large spectrum of occupations between a self-employed software developer, and a "corporate NPC", don't you? And, do you really reject all counterarguments outright, like you heard all of them already and there is nothing new you can learn, nor any place of individual circumstances in life?
Drupon 18 days ago [-]
>NPC
>mog
Touch grass
Grombobulous 18 days ago [-]
[dead]
inigyou 17 days ago [-]
But the corporations are where all the money is, and the system murders you if you don't have money.
pipes 17 days ago [-]
It doesn't reward you if you don't produce anything that someone is willing to pay you for. Who has been murdered for not having money?
inigyou 17 days ago [-]
Literally every person who died of exposure while homeless.
andai 18 days ago [-]
[dead]
buildingrezycle 18 days ago [-]
[flagged]
silverpinetea 18 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fxwin 18 days ago [-]
> That’s self-aggrandizing white male behavior!
I think you might be victimizing yourself a bit much there
18 days ago [-]
slator 18 days ago [-]
[dead]
Madmallard 17 days ago [-]
If you haven't made games and can't show them on the spot you won't get hired in the gaming industry depending on role
popularonion 17 days ago [-]
Games industry is a special case, more adjacent to the design industry.
I worked at a few Fortune 500 companies and interviewed a lot of candidates for both simple CRUD and harder systems programming work. Side projects, GitHub stuff, or even an independent bootstrapped business almost NEVER helped the candidate and more often seemed to hurt.
The only thing that would definitely help was getting your patches into major, major projects like the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, etc.
Madmallard 9 days ago [-]
I showed them my battle arena game in XNA at Amazon and it seemed to be a key thing that swayed the hiring manager
MingLei_dev 18 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 00:22:12 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
The other day I saw someone famous(ish) announce a new desktop application, to meaningful reception.
Thirty minutes later I had the same application, in every meaningful way. Built, working, ready for distribution.
It was just a test and I’m not about to sell it, but I can’t see how this doesn’t come down hard on indie developers.
This example produced reasonably done swift using appropriate system libs… so while “slop” will be a thing people might ignore for now, I think the bar has to go way, way up for real developers.
That was not difficult. Though obviously I wouldn’t declare it so and actually ship it to paying people in 30 minutes.
As for the rest of your point, that’s certainly going to be a fair assessment, much of the time, for now.
But that wasn’t really the point. We’re already pretty close to being there on “just tell the machine what you want” for huge swaths of non-critical software. And I don’t think pressure from that is going to let up.
They are linked. LLMs mean reduced barriers and more competition, which makes promotion harder.
It may or may not be a great time to be a popular indie dev, but for the less known folks - it’s a lottery
Agreed friend
Also, "it takes five years to become an overnight success" is a fantastic line.
Great read
but in software engineering with ageism - your value "goes down". when it should be the reverse if you're an IC.
so yeah going your own way as quick as possible - is not insurance for your sanity but income too.
is it easy no, but worth it.
I think I am not the lucky one to get overnight success and like in the post get the lucky time on iOS 15 release
Being writing a long article to record my indie app developper journey, Hope I can read in calm of it one decade later
The hard part was the customer and technical support. Huge time and energy sink fielding those requests - some totally lucid and well written, some incomprehensible, some just kinda sketchy obviously looking to manipulate/exploit/whatever you, some from people using phones and software versions you've never heard of, some from people using a totally different app than yours, some who think you are Google/apple/Microsoft and please reset their password to hunter2 etc etc etc. Then you have the endless API churn and mandates from the app stores etc about what you can and can't do, what SDK needs updating for whatever, new requirements, new deprecations etc etc etc.
It was maybe 10% coding and building something, with the other 90% just dealing with "customer service" bullshit that gained you basically nothing (and certainly not making you any revenue).
I made some small time hobby money, but obviously I pulled all the apps eventually and never looked back really. I would not recommend doing this to anyone if you have a stable job that pays reasonably well already. Keep the day job, it's less hassle.
If their stated goal was to make a game engine then sure. That wasn't their stated goal.
Rent is due every month and stores don't accept personal IOUs....
I would be really surprised if the majority of HN audience didn’t have decent savings, unless SF is really as expensive as people say online?
The truth is, an overwhelming majority of people in the US live a very precarious life financially speaking. No doubt the US as a whole is a very rich country, but to paraphrase William Gibson, the money is there, just not evenly distributed.
You can do this and release things! Do both!
Or it's healthcare bs. And not the cool kind where you help people (tremendous respect for doctors and nurses). The bs kind where you make it slightly more efficient to bill them into bankruptcy.
Or it's generic SaaS which is more or less the most you can hope to get to work on. (It's where I am).
Then there's reams of poorly paid positions where you software mill excel-adjacent LOB apps.
I agree with the sentiment of parent comment. Corporate programming sucks. If you have the opportunity to not be alienated from the product of your labor, do it.
That's a really good description, I should update my linkedin profile :)
>mog
Touch grass
I think you might be victimizing yourself a bit much there
I worked at a few Fortune 500 companies and interviewed a lot of candidates for both simple CRUD and harder systems programming work. Side projects, GitHub stuff, or even an independent bootstrapped business almost NEVER helped the candidate and more often seemed to hurt.
The only thing that would definitely help was getting your patches into major, major projects like the Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, OpenJDK, etc.