Dunno man. Ideas alone aren't worth anything [0] and execution is everything [1], but good ideas and great execution will never go out of style regardless of how much competition is out there. I'm of the opinion that even if 10% of the population is now capable of creating a side project, there's still the same relatively-fixed amount of people capable of making a good side project, and even fewer who will see it through to a real product. Nothing has really changed in the aggregate. It's like architecture, there are always improvements in materials, tools and processes, and Claude and Codex can provide more laborers for almost free, but most people are still gonna be building uninspired McMansions instead of the Guggenheim.
What do you mean "nothing has changed"? Using your numbers, the SNR went off a cliff.
Use HN as an example - I used read the new stories all the time before they hit the frontpage, and upvote as needed.
But with 100s of slop submitted for every 1 actual good article, I can't do that anymore.
IOW, I have finite time. If 10% of the population is now able to vomit out side-projects, I am never going to find the one good one because it will be lost in a sea of rubbish.
So really, they are comparatively cheap. I, for one, have hundreds of ideas, but always lacked the time to execute on 5% of them.
- A todo app better than the existing ones
- A todo app with these 3 features
- A todo app with these 3 features, here's how the UI would look
I have tens of ideas, but maybe 1 - 3 that I believe have a meaningful chance to become successful and generate income ($20k annually or more) with great execution. I find it hard to come up with ideas that have a fairly clear path to success and can generate income.
Why do you look at it that way? Why does anyone beside you have to care about what you do?
Just build something for yourself. You will always have things you'd like to build for yourself. You will be in competition with yourself only and your target audience will be yourself.
Market forces do not apply to side-projects, because that's what people do for fun.
Just because there are chess computers, doesn't mean that no one plays chess anymore at home.
This is just a correction of something that managed to remain in an invalid state for an impressively long time.
Yes.
> The entire open source ecosystem works on this idea otherwise there would be no point in sharing and we can move to closed software.
No.
The _actual_ open source system consisted of hackers scratching their own itch and sharing the artifacts, because (it was assumed that) sharing is free. So if the work is already done and solved their problem, why not also share it as gift.
This remains unchanged.
The driving force of FOSS is not "how can I fix someone else's problem". It never has been.
Well.. maybe on HN it was different, but that's not "the open source ecosystem". And, yes, maybe some corps have gaslit naive people into believing that they must donate their lives to said corps.
If you have the time tona scratch your own itch and gift the results, it implies you have a source of income that gives you the time/lifestyle to do such a thing. You might be a tenured academic, or live in a society with a strong safety net. Or you might be able to do your day job in 1/2 the allotted time.
The problem is that a those scenarios are eroding precipitously, leaving more to seek compensation for their work output, whether it is closed or open source.
a) Almost no one but you cares and
b) Now that this has become trivial, there's no much joy in it. The struggle we had before A.I was the real joy; prompting agents for a few days and getting what you want isn't that joyful.
The whole side project or even private project thing doesn't just hinge on being able to produce software. There's a lot more.
In software it's the same thing. People don't really want software they want data and data transformation. But traditionally the proxy for that has been selling the software (either as a desktop app or then later as sole kind of service).
You could argue that in either case the proxy is not what people want but yet because of the difficulty of selling the "actual" thing the proxy market has flourished.
We're now inventing a new tool that will completely disrupt that market and any software business that is predicated on the complexity required to create the software to transform the data is going to get severely disrupted. Software itself will be worthless.
A lot of the moats are gone, but quality (and security) is in a nose dive. AI built project might be the Ikea furniture. Good for the masses, but there's still a market (much smaller) for well crafted applications and services. It's hard to say what it'll look like in a couples years though. Maybe even the crafting is eventually gone. /shrug
No one else will want this specific piece of software. But I love it.
Sure, there will be 100x the competition, but there will be also 100x the software needs. Now, if you want to get crazy rich building software, that does get tougher, but that's a good thing, I think.
Even if they were I disagree that 10x more ideas being produced means 10x more products in competition. You could leverage AI to execute but still have terrible ideas, leadership, product stewardship etc.
I think some clever people with a real and valuable insight will finally be able to turn that insight into a product. I also think the other 9 products will be get rich quick attempts by people with nothing to offer.
I think there's more opportunity to do something novel.
AI can't do it, and the humans with the skills to do it are rapidly disappearing.