Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff.
The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.
That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).
Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.
Building is not any less important now, AI just highlights this fact. The software I work on is the difference between people getting paid or not, which those people consider very important - I use AI to do that by letting it improve the quality of the software, with less bugs, more performance etc.
The 10000th social media spammming SaaS being built in public is no less important now than it was before AI - we can just see how irrelevant it is now that it can also be built faster, by virtually anybody.
Aaaannnnd they're out of business and it was because of slowing demand and tightening credit the whole time.
Here in Europe this is not a thing, I've been hearing about such cases mostly from the US where it's clear that there is a recession going - I don't know why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone who does not view reality as whatever is said by the talking heads on TV.
Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....
Yeah, IMO one of the first things we'll see change is more of a migration back to monoliths. Right now adding a feature has to go through multiple teams, a dozen services, a coordinated implementation and deployment schedule, a Byzantine and often manual set of integration tests, etc. Yeah AI can help with that, but the point is that AI doesn't need it. On a monolith, it sucks for dev teams because parallel development at large scale is difficult and other teams' bugs can delay the launch of your unrelated project. Hence, microservices became popular. With AI, development happens so fast that it's largely serial. So there's no real coordination needed. A whole feature is one PR, one set of tests, one app to run locally if you want, one deployment, one thing to look at and roll back if there's a bug. Creates a virtuous cycle all the way up.
I imagine lots of established companies will struggle migrating back to that pattern, but I have to think most new companies will head in that direction, which should let them catch up quickly.
This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.
By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.
> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.
How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
If you've never put a cupboard together, you would have learned what the different parts, what size of screws to use (in the rough sense),... You may have forget it right after, but when someone ask you to help them, you will be a bit more proficient than someone with no experience.
But the nice thing about a cupboard and its components is that they are real objects, so the remembrance is done with the whole body (like the feeling of a screw not correctly inserted). Software development is 90% a mental activity.
Firstly, if you're doing those steps, you're building your own tutorial, not just following the exact steps in a manual provided with the software. The sample config won't be exact or perfect for your setup, so you'll need to say least figure out how to adjust it to your needs.
That said, I think you're still leaning things building IKEA-style software. The first time I learned how to program, I learned from a book and I tried things out by copying listings from the book by hand into files on my computer and executing them. Essentially, it was programming-by-IKEA-manual, but it was valuable because I was trying things out with my own hands, even if I didn't fully understand every time why I needed the code I'd been told to write.
From there I graduated to fiddling with those examples and making changes to make it do what I wanted, not what the book said. And over time I figured out how to write entirely new things, and so on and so forth. But the first step required following very simple instructions.
The analogy isn't perfect, because my goal with IKEA furniture is usually not to learn how to build furniture, but to get a finished product. So I learn a little bit about using tools, but not a huge amount. Whereas when typing in that code as a kid, my goal was learning, and the finished product was basically useless outside of that.
The author's example there feels like a bit of both worlds. The task requires more independent thought than an IKEA manual, so they need to learn and understand more. But the end goal is still practical.
I can't relate to this anymore and honestly after embracing vibe coding, I'm sick of reading posts like this (and I don't want to personally attack the write who I sympathize with to some degree). Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool. I also remember the brief moment of disbelief when I noticed AI could really code better than me, until I realized that the amount of problems and projects I could solve now basically exploded, while the stuff I was previously forced to deal with is now a waste of time - on to better things, as was always the case in human history.
A programmer is someone telling machines what to do - we will be doing more of that than ever in human history. That said, "coders" not so much - maybe its better to identify as a "person trying to help and care for others" than a profession, since the former will always have a place in society.
Along with value, an amature non-developer can create liabilities and technical debt if they decide to distribute something that "works." When reviewing hundreds of printed pages of LLM generated software architecture and code from ChatGPT generated in the business sphere of an org, it remains the programmer's job to advise and lead.
someone else on here analogized this perfectly: coding with AI is like solving a solved puzzle. you engage other neural pathways to get the result you want, but "the thing" that made me love doing this for work is completely removed.
> Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool.
> [...] I noticed AI could really code better than me [...]
AI code output is generally considered mediocre (in the sense of "on the median"). If it codes better than you, it might be that your code output is generally below average.
Might it be the case that you don't grasp how good one can get with computers and thus not realize that one could be much better than you are at programming them? Did you consider for a moment the possibility that you were missing something?
Notice how I said "coding", not "programming". Coding to me is "should I do an early return or use an if/else? Should I extract that variable into a function to make it cleaner?". It's about focusing on the trivialities that come with insisting on meticulously hand typing and reviewing every line instead of focusing on software quality, design and user needs.
If we want to make that distinction, then we should also acknowledge that "vibecoding" is a misnomer and should be called "vibeprogramming", because it delegates the whole act of programming to the LLM, leaving you with fleshing out the specs (which is not programming).
If that is so, then your whole comment is inconsistent and akin to "I do all my poetry with LLMs now and I don't see what people have against it: it's often better than me at punctuation!"
Great contrarian indicator for when people say that vibe coding is not "real development work" or economically viable/a job in the future - here is someone asking if another person can vibe code something for them that is single file of swift, the prompt could be as simple as "convert this to linux".
I don't think Linux has an equivalent of Apple's vision API, and if it does I guarantee it's not as robust and isn't baked-in to every Linux distro (the way Vision is baked-in to every Mac released after X date).
That alone will likely prevent this from just being a "convert to Linux" vibe session ... which is unfortunate, as I would LOVE to have this on Linux.
I am working on a game side project where I started to force myself not to look at the code (the foundation was written by hand). I just recently launched a big update, all written with agentic code. I really enjoy it and do believe it's the future...plug for reference: https://thefakeborzi.itch.io/tower-chess/devlog/1321604/the-...
The 10% reduction in hiring for young workers is entirely because industry (software, manufacturing) at least in the united states (and probably the world) is contracting and in recession, while the services and government sector has been the main sector growing since a long time now - completely due to economic and geopolitical reasons, nothing to do with AI.
Genuine curiosity: how do you know that software is in a recession? What measures do you use to determine this? And how do you know that the recession is not AI driven? I don't think it is either, but it's more of a feeling; I'm not sure how I would make that argument more grounded.
Well, the best measurement is hiring slowdown and bankruptcies. Bankruptcies in the US are up 13.1%.
Traditionally, you wouldn't look at the release of a productivity tool coinciding with a hiring slowdown and assume that it's automation causing the hiring slowdown, your first instinct would be that the sector is not doing well.
Check sum of free cash flow of major tech co.s. you'll soon find out that the cash needle of industry as a whole is not moving that much.
They are just round tripping the cash that was sitting in their accounts through investments that make their way back through advertising channels or compute channels.
Once you see the bigger picture, you'll realise its all just a Fugazi post covid
Some anecdata: I have a buddy who runs a smallish consulting firm, and another buddy who's a software recruiter. Both are telling me that they've stopped hiring developers except for senior developers. From this limited sample size, the market seems to be convinced that it no longer needs or wants junior developers because their tasks can be outsourced to LLMs.
Outside of tech, my eulogy writer friend got fired and replaced by ChatGPT. So when gramma dies, someone will now read a page of slop at her funeral instead of something that a person with empathy wrote.
I’m sorry for your friend’s job loss, but reading a page of fairly generic eulogy written by someone who knew nothing of grandma beyond what the family said and basic obituary facts doesn’t seem massively different from a page of fairly generic eulogy written by an AI based on the same inputs.
If you can find a workable way to put the family in the improvements loop, the AI eulogy could be far better at expressing the family’s sentiment about grandma. (I’m not going to want to go 3 rounds of edits over 2-3 days with a human to get it just right, but going 8 rounds of tweaking/perfecting with an AI in a 20-30 minute sitting is appealing and would give a better result in a lot of cases.)
Under those conditions, how much more am I willing to pay for a human-written eulogy? $0 at most, and probably a negative amount.
"At the same time, only 1-7% of all users want to be tracked for online advertisement if asked openly. However, "pay or okay" gets 99.9% of users to agree to online tracking. If more than 90% of users do not get what they genuinely want, we have everything but a "genuine" choice."
If I got to the shop and don't want to buy the product I should just get it for free, because that is what I genuinely want? Genuine choice = I get to choose exactly what I want, always?
Edit, because people seem to miss the point:
Just because populist politicians want to legally restrict business from offering a choice does not mean that a "genuine" choice is not presented.
Paid access is okay, so is showing advertising, and even requiring that you pay to access a service (they don’t have to give it away for free). What isn’t okay is requiring either paying or selling your data (selling away privacy) for advertising.
So yes businesses are doing something okay by offering a paid version, but it doesn’t matter if they’re saying “pay or let us sell your data” as the latter is illegal.
There’s an obvious workaround - require the payment for everyone, and on the side offer to pay the customer $x (which coincidentally is the same as the payment needed) for personal information.
I don't think this trick would do anything - you're still conditioning a contract on consent (and it's no more necessary than before), so still don't have "freely given consent" if you wanted to rely on that basis for data processing.
> > Consent is presumed not to be freely given [...] if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.
"The latter is illegal" has been a point of debate since the GDPR was inacted because it is certainly not obvious in the GDPR.
IMHO, decisions that have upheld that it is indeed illegal have tended to be "militant" and ignored that users had a genuine choice, and in fact 3 options: Accept cookies, etc or pay or leave. In practice we see that 99% of users choose to accept cookies/tracking, but this is not because the choice isn't genuine, it is because they don't care about cookies/tracking as long it means free access and that pisses off some people.
You cannot say that users as a whole accept cookies/tracking as it’s heavily region dependent. At a previous job we implemented a cookie consent banner and tracked statistics of accept/reject, and while some regions were very high (95+%), Germany was particularly low (70%), so it’s hard to paint a picture in a general way.
Regardless, I’m not sure if you’re right that it’s contentious about what is allowed with respect to GDPR here. My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly), and the companies that do this are doing it in bad faith (and/or following in the footsteps of Meta), and in reality what they’re doing is banking on the fact that going through the courts takes a long time. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.
I was taking data from the OP's quote: "However, "pay or okay" gets 99.9% of users to agree to online tracking.". Anyway that's nitpicking as whatever the exact number it is the vast majority.
> My understanding is that it is illegal to do what’s here (not just in Austria but in the GDPR directly),
That's exactly my point. The GDPR does not say that it is illegal. It says that people must have a genuine choice, "genuine" meaning free of coercion. Now, "accept or be fired", "accept or you can't have surgery" are obviously not genuine choices. But arguing that "accept or you need to pay to access this news website" is the same and not a genuine choice is almost pushing the interpretation ad absurdum (what are genuine choices, then?), hence my previous comment.
> We wouldn’t even be having this discussion if these companies just put ads without tracking/selling user data, which, as mentioned, is fine.
The real world never so simple. In the real world if they don't "just" do that it is probably because it isn't working commercially.
> That's exactly my point. The GDPR does not say that it is illegal. It says that people must have a genuine choice [...] arguing that "accept or you need to pay to access this news website" is the same and not a genuine choice is almost pushing the interpretation ad absurdum
"Genuine choice" alone isn't sufficient - from the GDPR:
> > Consent is presumed not to be freely given if it does not allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations despite it being appropriate in the individual case, or if the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, is dependent on the consent despite such consent not being necessary for such performance.
It seems difficult to argue that DerStandard's "pay or okay" approach satisfies this - and indeed the court found it did not.
My impression as a non-lawyer is that the "freely given consent" basis is intended to cover where users opt to give data truly of their own violition, but is instead being used as the "continue on selling data as we were" basis (funnel users into clicking a button, then use that as a carte blanche for effectively any processing).
> The real world never so simple. In the real world if they don't "just" do that it is probably because it isn't working commercially.
I feel the problem is that as soon as one party starts using invasive ads, other parties are at a relative disadvantage and will be paid less than before if they don't follow suit. Seems like the kind of game theory problem that the market is bad at, but regulation can resolve favorably.
> It seems difficult to argue that DerStandard's "pay or okay" approach satisfies this
Why not? Is it not necessary to pay for the service? As long as they are only processing what is necessary for the ads to work then I argue that it is necessary, and they are given a choice, too.
We're going in circle a bit... And always come back to my previous point that in general those decision interpret the GDPR in the most extreme way possible, ignoring real world scenarios and the whole range of circumstances, which I can only describe as a "militant" approach. Unfortunately this is quite common on most issues these days.
> I feel the problem is that as soon as one party starts using invasive ads
It's not invasive ads, it's targeted ads. Targeted ads are more valuable than non targeted ads because they work better. That's it. And, frankly, if I am going to see ads I might as well see targeted ones, which at least I have a chance of finding interesting (that's the whole point) rather than having to endure tampon ads while I am reading the news.
The whole thing is purely political, even ideological.
It doesn't seem to allow separate consent to different personal data processing operations to be given, for one.
> Is it not necessary to pay for the service?
That it is possible to pay instead implies that the processing of the data is not necessary (which is taken as being objectively necessary for the core functions of the contract, not financial convenience).
To my understanding the reason that "despite such consent not being necessary for such performance" wording is there in the first place is because necessity for performance of the contract is already its own basis. Their attempt to obtain freely given consent is because their purpose is not actually necessary, else they could use that on its own as the basis for the processing.
> always come back to my previous point that in general those decision interpret the GDPR in the most extreme way possible, ignoring real world scenarios, which I can only describe as a "militant" approach. Unfortunately this is quite common on most issues these days.
The idea that "it is necessary for our balance sheets to sell your data" would be sufficient for any and all processing seems the most extreme one to me.
> It's not invasive ads, it's targeted ads. [...] And, frankly, if I am going to see ads I might as well see targeted ones,
Ads targetted by building up a profile of where you live, who you interact with, what sites you browse, maybe even what you're susceptible to (FOMO, gambling), etc.
GDPR doesn't prevent you from opting to receive targeted ads if you really do freely give your consent (with no detriment if you were to decline).
> Targeted ads are more valuable than non targeted ads because they work better.
Invasive ads work better for gaining market share in the same way a JS bitcoin miner that uses more of website visitors' GPUs works better. The first sites to deploy it get paid more, but then when all sites are using it we're pretty much back where we started (because it's largely a zero-sum game) but with waste and harm disproportionate to benefits when allowed to go too far.
That's where I think it makes sense for regulation to impose a limit, to stop the downwards slide to a worse overall outcome that can happen when each party is acting in their own immediate interest.
> Their attempt to obtain freely given consent is because their purpose is not actually necessary, else they could use that on its own as the basis for the processing.
Why would the GDPR even describe consent and consent in relations to contract, then?
> The idea that "it is necessary for our balance sheets to sell your data" would be sufficient for any and all processing seems the most extreme one to me.
That's an obviously disingenuous interpretation of my point.
> GDPR doesn't prevent you from opting to receive targeted ads if you really do freely give your consent (with no detriment if you were to decline).
This implies a right to access commercial websites for free, which cannot be reasonable, or only a choice between no access and payment, which also cannot be reasonable.
Again, this is all extreme and ideological. That's the big issue with both the GDPR and its interpretation. And we're right back to my initial point that the issue is in the hands of militants.
More broadly, this is a strange take in the EU: The same people that are happy to have to carry ID cards, to have "free speech" controlled, to have this, to have that, are up in arms at the thought of targeted ads. My hypothesis is that this is because, at the core, the issue is not "privacy" or targeted ads, but commercial companies making money, i.e. bad capitalists (c.f. previous paragraph), which is a political angle that we're seeing very often in Europe, along with the idea that people are allowed free will as long as they make the "right" choices...
> This implies a right to access commercial websites for free, which cannot be reasonable, or only a choice between no access and payment, which also cannot be reasonable.
What do you mean the latter isn’t reasonable? It is perfectly reasonable to make your website only accessible to paying users.
> More broadly, this is a strange take in the EU: The same people that are happy to have to carry ID cards, to have "free speech" controlled, to have this, to have that, are up in arms at the thought of targeted ads.
Ignoring the obvious geopolitical spin to this: The EU considers privacy a right, i.e. something you can’t sell away in a contract, so I don’t see the issue with people being upset about their right to privacy being affected.
> Why would the GDPR even describe consent and consent in relations to contract, then?
Freely given consent is a lawful basis, allowing for processing even if it's not necessary for legal/contractual reasons that would qualify the processing for another basis (or a mix of necessary and unecessary).
But here they're clearly not meeting the "allow separate consent to be given to different personal data processing operations" requirement, and if they only met the second requirement (can't make performance of contract dependant on the consent to processing beyond what's necessary) by nature of all of their processing being necessary (which I feel is highly doubtful) then it seems like they would've already been covered by the "processing is necessary for the performance of a contract" basis. Though as before I'm not a lawyer.
> That's an obviously disingenuous interpretation of my point.
Necessity for the performance of a contract is a lawful basis for processing under the GDPR, and to my understanding you're suggesting "necessity for the performance of a contract" should be interpreted loosely to include a kind of "financial necessity" that permits selling personnal data to adtech companies.
To me it seems like that same justification could be used for any selling of personal of data (maybe I go too far by saying any processing, since it wouldn't necessarily justify non-commercial processing). If you don't think that's a consequence of your interpretation, I'd be interested to hear why.
> This implies a right to access commercial websites for free, which cannot be reasonable, or only a choice between no access and payment, which also cannot be reasonable.
Websites can use most forms of monetization they always have - just not selling of personal data (unless the user freely gives consent). Regular ads, selling an ad-free version, upsell nags, all the badges/superchats/cosmetics/etc. are all still fine.
> Freely given consent is a lawful basis, allowing for processing even if it's not necessary for legal/contractual reasons that would qualify the processing for another basis (or a mix of necessary and unecessary).
Again, this is all a narrow and militant interpretation of "necessary for contractual reason", not least when all data show that the people are fine with it. In a contract, a form of quid pro quo is necessary, if targeted ads are the form of "payment" asked and if there is no imbalance of power or coercion (and it's hard to see how being refused access to a random website any sort of coercion or serious negative consequence) then there should be no issue and the "deal" is actually the main aspect of the contract. Any other outcome is either that the GDPR is badly drafted or that this is an ideological agenda at play (obviously I favour the latter).
> Again, this is all a narrow and militant interpretation of "necessary for contractual reason",
Given "necessary for contractual reason" is on its own a lawful basis, I don't see how your interpretation (that selling your data to ad companies is "necessary") wouldn't effectively nullify much of the GDPR, allowing pretty much any use of customer data to be justified so long as the company makes money from it.
The European Data Protection Board, whose purpose is to ensure consistent application of the GDPR, has written:
> > If there are realistic, less intrusive alternatives, the processing is not ‘necessary’. Article 6(1)(b) will not cover processing which is useful but not objectively necessary for performing the contractual service [...] even if it is necessary for the controller’s other business purposes.
> > A controller can rely on the first option of Article 6(1)(b) to process personal data when it can [... establish ...] processing is necessary in order that the particular contract with the data subject can be performed. [Emphasis in original]
> > does not cover situations where the processing is not genuinely necessary for the performance of a contract
> > it is required that the processing is objectively necessary for a purpose that is integral to the delivery of that contractual service
> > Example 2: The same online retailer wishes to build profiles of the user’s tastes and lifestyle choices based on their visits to the website. Completion of the purchase contract is not dependent upon building such profiles. Even if profiling is specifically mentioned in the contract, this fact alone does not make it ‘necessary’ for the performance of the contract. If the on-line retailer wants to carry out such profiling, it needs to rely on a different legal basis.
> not least when all data show that the people are fine with it.
Doesn't appear to be the case when the case when it's actually a freely given choice (as low as 0.1% when it's opt-in) - which is why companies fight so hard to manipulate user choice with dark patterns and obfuscation, or outright breaking the regulation.
Tracking is not payment nor is the company entitled to track people. Der Standard is free to ask for money. They are not free to make tracking condition of a service.
What you miss is that the EU has decided that your business can not depend on people selling their privacy. This is very far from crazy, we disallow many other types to businesses too.
If EU punished the choice to provide the user an option to pay to not be tracked, EU ought to illegalise the entire business model of ad-supported “free” media where end user is the product delivered to advertisers, with no choice to not be tracked—even if you are not, in fact, a user (your shadow profile will still be built); otherwise seems to be hypocritical.
To pay to not be tracked is a joke of a choice—no one would choose to pay—but it only highlights the dark reality of how ad-supported media distort the market: honest competition is impossible against a “free” offer with a difficult to understand catch.
The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.
That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).
Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.
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