The rule to remember about solo development: <i>Alone I can go faster, together we can go further!</i><p>Everything else boils down to this.
Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.
> Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.<p>I disagree; it's even more obvious with AI that, with AI, a solo dev can go even faster, but still, with AI, you need a team to go further.
AI does change the equation. It frees a solo developer to focus more on the big picture. BUT... with the current generation of AI agents, I think you are still right. You still need a second (or ideally more; I'd say 5) developer(s) to get enough perspective to have solid plans and roadmaps.<p>So, while I currently [mostly] agree, I think the / a next generation of agents might take that over a threshold and make solo development close enough to the equivalent of current 2-dev work to meaningfully change the equation. Furthermore I think that does not even need new models; I think current models with better "harness / tooling / system prompting / skills / etc." (whatever you may call the text files describing important procedures), might be able to fill most of that gap.<p>Obviously work that needs more than 2 devs planning might take even longer to fully solve with 1 dev + multiple agents, if ever.<p>My current mental model is that humans can very well think about and walk the boundary of problems, while [current] AI agents can fill the inside to some extent. If a problem has inherent "multi-dimensional boundaries", it might be hard for a person to imagine and walk it well to guide the agents. And I think most of the interesting problems fall in this category.
In the time it takes me to make a single-node webservice with a CLI POC client I can now have a fully scalable SAAS with clients for iOS, Android, mac, linux, windows and web-based, user documentation in several languages and a suite of unit tests.<p>Surely that's both faster and further?<p>IMO AI agents are like a team of remote consultants that only talk shop and have no sense of humor.
Can you talk a little about what "further" means to you?
Sure:<p>1. A primary meaning, "Further" means "revenue" (or "profit"). You and your AI together can sit and create a competitor to Windows 11, do the marketing copy, a sales strategy, feature testing etc, but without a team that product isn't going anywhere.<p>2. A secondary meaning, "Further" means "Stamina". You + AI can create everything above, but without a community (whether paying customers or free users), the product dies when your interest in it dies, <i>even if it is still making money!</i>
I agree. It sure does change what it means.
Team just eats your runway, and adds shit ton of overhead.<p>Plus it is much healthier to have a social life outside of work. Talk about something else, no algos!
“We need to go far, fast”
The sharpest con for me is blind spots: solo you're the author, the reviewer and the QA, and all three share the same wrong assumptions. Same goes for weaknesses: on a team someone covers what you're bad at, solo nobody does. LLMs patch this surprisingly well on the technical side - it's a reviewer that didn't write the code, but much less on marketing, positioning, all the stuff outside the editor.
For me the Best Pros is "That one random-internet-comment is a good usability improvement, ask LLM to do the small change and commit immediately."<p>Smaller ideas need not be <i>approved</i>, or held back by schedule pressure from bean counters. Just Do It. :). It's the small corrections which end up polishing the product as good as "professional usability studies".
I feel like your con about not making the right design choices isn't a con. Solo development doesn't mean throwing out the principles that help you learn. Prototyping and beta releases exist to validate design choices without needing a team to debate them. If your software has users they become the sounding board. You mentioned only asking your friends about your ideas. The best part about prototypes and betas is that you get to build something, use it, and see if you like it before committing. If the idea doesn't get traction, throw it away!
All the pros listed really resonate with me. I don't develop software as a career anymore, but do it as a hobby. I wouldn't take on a second developer partner for any of my projects. I guess it would feel like working on a beautiful, personal painting and recruiting a second artist to paint half of it. Maybe that works for others, but it's just not how I see myself creating a work. I'd accept small patches to fix bugs, but for the actual overall thrust of my projects, I'll probably always be lone-wolf.
I feel the same way. I have hired a number of people over the years for various jobs who I’ve enjoyed working with. But it was out of a desire to capitalize on various situations, move faster. When it comes down to it, I am happier moving slower and alone, and the end result is always better.
Founding a company, or just working on any project with a very small team (Less than 5 people) has all of the same issues the author wrote about here. At least they did for me. I resonated a lot with this.
---<p>Separately, I hope the author of this project is able recognize how this project might be able to grow sustainably. Its a hard thing to know that you won't be able to work on something forever, and either building a community who wants to maintain a core project or having some company pay to maintain it could be a good idea. Linus isn't going to be around forever, but I expect that linux will outlive him by a good margin.
I imagine that this will happen organically if Luxury Yacht ever grows to the point that I can't maintain it alone anymore. Although given that it's such a niche thing, with a relatively limited scope (relative to your Linux comparison) I don't really see this happening.<p>The more likely outcome is that something happens to me and I can't maintain it anymore. But if there's sufficient interest in keeping it going, anyone can fork it and pick up where I left off.
A version of this I've been enjoying is mostly solo dev but with a biz-guy partner. I mostly just build software but have a partner who will go find out how people are using it, what they want, handle inbound, and be there to chat about ideas even if we're not getting into the technical weeds.
One of the biggest benefits I see AI bringing is to solo development.<p>Not because it’ll make you faster (which it can).<p>But because when it’s 2am and your server is crashing and you don’t understand the error messages and your solo business is melting down, with AI you have a virtual helper to get you through solving tough problems.<p>Nothing is worse than being alone and things are breaking and you don’t know what to do or who to talk too since you’re solo and don’t have anyone else to troubleshoot with.<p>AI can be your helper in those times of need.
I've spent most of the last two or so years working solo (engineering wise) professionally. I'd say the biggest con is that it's lonely. I've gone weeks without talking to people at work. I think that would drive most people crazy :).<p>I'd say responsibility is the same for me as I've only worked at small companies as a generalist. But yeah I suspect if you come from big tech land, being the everything person might be super tough to get used to.
Lessons from my failure:<p>- do everything you can to keep burnout at bay<p>- you do, in fact, need a holiday<p>- hyperfocus is not your friend, <i>ever</i>; if you feel you can’t put it down, you must put it down<p>- never delete emails; the one thing you can guarantee is that you will need an email you deleted<p>- if you look back at your notes and they are not instantly obvious, rewrite them while you still remember what you meant, because one day you won’t<p>- you might be selling your abilities but you should never rely on them yourself; you do need systems<p>- you can fall out of love with the thing you are best at<p>- listen to your friends when they sell your talents; if they say you can do a thing, who are you to argue?<p>- three days of fully billable work per week is already too risky to gamble on, so:<p>- you are not charging enough<p>- YOU ARE NOT CHARGING ENOUGH<p>- FFS do you even listen? You’re not charging enough
maybe a little bit of telemetry that is meant to inform the developer is OK<p>i assume most people are just against the ad-driven telemetry
Part of the cons is offset, if the single maintainer dissapears, nothing a fork can't fix :)
Any tips if you have been a solo dev for a very long term (20+ years) for getting hired as part of a team?
Honestly, just applying to positions you're interested in and trying to get interviews. Worst case, you can treat the job interview as practice / learning, best case you pass the interview and get a job offer.<p>Actually getting job interviews can be difficult. It helps to find the email associated with the person hiring, that way you can email them directly to make sure your application actually gets seen.
The conclusion I have drawn is that the only way I will be part of a team is to hire them or be indispensable on one specific project thing.
> But... I don't truly know what my users want. There is no telemetry of any kind in Luxury Yacht. I like being able to say that, but it means I have no idea how many people are using it, or how they're using it. I don't know what features are the most important to other people.<p>So add telemetry and a request tracker like <a href="https://www.productboard.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.productboard.com/</a>. This is not a solo vs team thing.
I don't want to add telemetry. And I think this is where the solo vs team thing matters. I can just say "no telemetry" and I don't need to argue with anyone about it. I make the decision and live with the consequence.<p>I don't really <i>need</i> to know how many people use the app. It would be cool to know, but not necessary.<p>If someone wants a feature, or a fix, they can open an issue.
Most projects don't need telemetry. They need better logs.<p>On the backend...
Why wouldn't you log every request that hits your server, and why wouldn't you already know what those requests mean? Why would you let your frontend make direct requests to any other server when you can just proxy it yourself and maintain control?<p>On the frontend...
What's so hard about wrapping all your event listeners and periodically sending those logs back to your server?<p>That's not even scratching the surface, but even something this simple and easy to implement is already miles ahead of most free-tier telemetry offerings, and you retain full control.
If you don't have a backend, then it's all telemetry, right? And backend logs don't capture a lot of the UX side of things - how a call got triggered, from where, etc (which yeah you can start to instrument, but then that's telemetry).
I'm a big believer in the philosophy "Make the thing you want, and chances are it's what others want also". I'm also a big believer in whole-hog vibe-coding. So none of these cons resonate with me. The code is slop, hell yeah it is! And it works GREAT. The users? It's me, and anyone who sees me using it and gets jealous.
I should probably create my own project at some point, but most of what I do is building mini shopping malls or integrating large machinery equipment. Someday, I'd like to make a project that other people actually use.<p>As an independent developer, the advantage is that I can do a lot of different things. It's hard to go deep into one area, but I can work across many different kinds of projects—building drones, inspection equipment, testing gear, shopping malls, red-team work for security companies, smart farm control systems, home trading systems, apartment wall pads, POS, WMS, data collection for academic papers, and more. I've worked on quite a variety of projects and stacks. That's the upside. The downside is that it's hard to develop the same depth of expertise as a team-based developer. In reality, most of the work is just reading manuals and implementing things according to them.<p>Right now I'm working on creating a programming language, but I'm a little worried because everyone seems to be building languages with LLMs these days. Ultimately, a language needs to offer enough value for users to actually want to try it, and I'm not sure I can create something compelling enough to attract interest.<p>The machinery equipment work I usually do depends on factories expanding nearby, but lately the area I live in has been declining, so there's not much of that work anymore. Someday I'd like to build a project that people remember. But unlike Western developers, I'm far from the mainstream of programming, and my skills aren't that great either, so I'm not sure what to do or what would even be a good direction.<p>If I joined a company, I'd have to leave my area, but then rent would be hard to afford, and my workflow would be so different from theirs that I'm not sure it would work out. I feel like I've designed my career poorly. And it's not like I'd be able to get hired in this job market anyway
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