Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

https://derwiki.medium.com/do-things-that-dont-scale-and-then-don-t-scale-9fd2cd7e2156

by derwiki • 11 months ago

516 207 11 months ago

derwiki.medium.com

mooreds• 11 months ago

Interesting perspective about writing a bunch of mini-apps that you aren't concerned with making money on or scaling.

Reminds me a bit of the carpenters I've seen work who spend time building frames/other wood "tools" to help them get the actual work done faster.

The cost of writing software has definitely decreased. And you do have a different and smaller class of problems when you write an ad-hoc app.

j454• 11 months ago

Making tools to make the tools is the real devops.

CI/CD can be as complex and full of pagentry as some people want and it's great when it fits, and premature optimization the rest of the time.

tstrimple• 11 months ago

Those are called jigs and they really separate the good from great woodworkers. Tamar from 3x3Custom is probably one of my favorite YouTube woodworkers because she's all about making and using jigs. Typically they are trying to eliminate manual measurements for repeatable parts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTqqSEtvng

kylecazar2• 11 months ago

Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.

derwiki5• 11 months ago

Yep, totally — the OG advice was founder-focused. I just couldn’t resist twisting it a bit, because the line itself is too good not to repurpose.

netcan• 11 months ago

Yeah... i think that's pretty clear right from your title.

kylecazar2• 11 months ago

I didn't mention it in my original comment, but I enjoyed your article -- and agree that small, personal, purpose-built tools are having a moment in the age of LLM's. I like that application of AI.

In a way (as I understood it), what you're getting at is that not everything has to be a business. Businesses definitely do have to scale, but personal software doesn't.

j454• 11 months ago

It's also possible to build things to solve your own problems, that might be problems other people have too, which they also try to solve but fail at, which are problems that are painful enough that they would spend on.

They're harder to find in B2C than B2B. Individual problems can sometimes map to B2B.

salomonk_mur2• 11 months ago

Building a particular type of company - a tech startup.

I'd argue that we need to apply this to companies too. Stop building startups (which start losing money and may never ever make a profit in the process of scaling) and start creating companies (which make a profit ASAP and may never scale).

shooker435• 11 months ago

There's probably a middle ground here. Making a profit ASAP is only really possible if you're selling expertise, such as consulting. I really like the emerging term, "seed strapping" which aims to address this conundrum in the startup world: raise just enough to build the first iteration, then act like a bootstrapped business.

timr3• 11 months ago

"Tech startups" that make enough money to be interesting [1], but do not have the property of being a winner-take-all market, are the truly magical unicorns of software. If you have one, you should covet it and guard it viciously, because otherwise someone with more money is coming to eat your lunch [2][3].

OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has always been a weird fit.

[1] I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity," but would probably add some things like margin requirements if I thought about it more. Obviously you can exist as a consultant charging by the hour, and that's not what either of us is talking about.

[2] The only examples of this I've personally ever seen have been dominant players in niche markets with high bars to entry. So they weren't hyper-growth unicorns, but weren't really your definition of "companies", either. You don't get to these kinds of businesses by aiming to be one - you get there by trying for something bigger and topping out the market.

[3] Consider the phenomenon of the small vet clinic, which is rapidly ceasing to exist. Private equity has been steadily hoovering up these relatively high-margin, low-regulation businesses for the same economic reasons that software companies get big. If you try to create a vet clinic, you will be assimilated or crushed by a bigger player with a brand and the ability to undercut your prices.

chrisweekly• 11 months ago

"Startup" is often defined as "small company designed to grow quickly".

nickserv• 11 months ago

I feel like the main takeaway here is that if you want your personal project to last, you should run it on your own server.

j454• 11 months ago

Also making it easy to host and maintain. The more custom or esoteric libraries, the better.

If you do build it with boring tech in a simple way, you can just rely on it.

sdenton4• 11 months ago

It'll last until you lose interest or die. Shrug emoji.

midhir• 11 months ago

Then came the weirdness: bursts of Tor traffic, spammy signups

I have a small hobby site - maybe a few hundred real users ever, and a handful of regulars. But the logs and users table are full of brute force and lousy sql injection attempts.

Why does this happen? How is it economical?

j454• 11 months ago

They are automated bots, it's economical when it's automated.

Often, they have databases of technologies, see what they come across and try a bunch of things that have worked, or try to look at the version of the software on your server and try just that.

ACCount37• 11 months ago

Automated attacks, running on botnets or other breached servers.

Spraying 1-in-100000 chance attacks is very economical if you don't pay for compute or traffic.

bravesoul23• 11 months ago

Put a challenge in. A shitty hidden field honeytrap challenge can massively reduce this without needing to present people with a puzzle.

trenchpilgrim• 11 months ago

It's economical because the compute and bandwidth come from devices infected with malware.

m3kw9• 11 months ago

Money maximizers always try to scale, so we can handle a million users. I do think that’s risky most times. When you have limited resources Don’t scale till it gets close to breaking.

zahlman• 11 months ago

There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.”

Yes, it was posted again just the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44913359

derwiki5• 11 months ago

Haha funny timing! I wrote this post last weekend and haven’t checked HN much this week

quuxplusone• 11 months ago

I agree it would be nice to put the source of the quote in your own post. It's so easy to Google before quoting.

On another note: did you just tell a bunch of strangers on the internet how to snail-mail arbitrary photos to your mom? Or does that email thing only activate if the email comes from your own address? (Guess you'll find out! :))

tlhunter• 11 months ago

It's definitely the first result on Google and sort of ruins any credibility of the article.

mekoka• 11 months ago

Anyone who was part of the HN/YCombinator scene at the time PG wrote that piece (and many years later) would know what the title alludes to. Why would it ruin this article's credibility?

godot• 11 months ago

Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > Some things work precisely because they’re small.

I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between 2005 to 2010 or so where it was mostly college friends, high school friends, some work friends, and we all actually shared what we thought on our posts, shared links to interesting stuff, etc.

When all the relatives started being added to your network the vibe became decidedly different, and then acquaintances, people who aren't close, etc. and everyone has that one experience where one time they post something and someone who isn't close get offended, whether it's political or not, and they gradually share less and less.

rco8786• 11 months ago

Yea the first few years of Facebook were magical. It felt like suddenly you could connect with your peers in a new way, discover old friends, etc. Went downhill pretty quickly though.

thewebguyd• 11 months ago

Yeah, Facebook's best days were when it still required a .edu email to sign up.

Makes me wonder if there would still be a market for a smaller, niche social media like that, but on the open web and not locked behind something like Discord servers.

fullstackchris• 11 months ago

https://www.thegradcafe.com/survey/new/index.php

comes to mind... those were the days, circa 2014 for me, chilling with folk, waiting for thier grad admissions letters

ipaddr2• 11 months ago

This is the reason for facebooks success the rollout. Regardless of when you joined it was always better for you then the next group.

Everyone knows it's best days were when it was limited to Harvard.

There is a market for one. Can you roll it out the way facebook did to make it a success. Facebook technology started off pretty basic. There success is creating demand. Remember when facebook use to offer to login to hotmail and invite everyone for you before hotmail caught on and banned it? That's the secret sauce.

pier252• 11 months ago

Facebook around 2008 was pretty cool. Just me hanging out with my irl friends.

And then relatives started joining and it became more like a dinner with your extended family.

xgkickt3• 11 months ago

I thought Google+’s Circles was a good idea.

sugarpimpdorsey• 11 months ago

I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.

amelius• 11 months ago

You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.

xnx• 11 months ago

I can see many way where you can only follow (and be followed) by 1000 people would be better in many way. An audience of 1000 isn't monetizable so the network wouldn't be poisoned by ads ("sponsored content" AKA "sponcon").

NikolaNovak• 11 months ago

I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I felt in control and joyous and it was awesome.

I am, as always, a negative focus group - perhaps precisely for same reasons I loved it, apparently nobody else did :-/.

hnaccount_rng• 11 months ago

You can't though. The problem is, that humanity is a web. Not a set of communities (at least on the scale of 1000s of people). And since those webs overlap you will either need to solve the overlap problem at the boundaries (taking engineering effort) or you will end up with essentially one big shard again. On the other hand, you really don't need to change anything on the backend. Simply limit the number of "tier 1" friends to 50, have a "tier 2" category for your 1000 and put everything else in "acquaintances" and split engagement between those.

The problem with that though is: You will generate an enormous amount of social friction "why am I tier 2, but (without loss of generality) Karen is Tier 1?" and reduce monetizability. So truly nobody will feel happy about those restrictions. And since it doesn't solve any engineering problem you run into (see above) there is no one incentivised to build such a thing. (Ironically this may not be completely true, given that this is pretty much how Chinese social media apps work. So maybe states [or at least power structures] are incentivised to build such a system)

wat10000• 11 months ago

The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that.

I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but everyone sees it and it all goes to hell.

There are some people whose company I enjoy whose Facebook posts are basically an unending stream of “people who don’t support Trump are evil/stupid/garbage.” And I’m thinking, you realize that includes several people you supposedly like? I’m sure they have a group of people with whom they talk shit about the political opposition, and another group where they stick to other topics, but both groups end up seeing the stuff and it’s just alienating.

xp842• 11 months ago

This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.

wincy• 11 months ago

I remember saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

saghm2• 11 months ago

I don’t think she even noticed honestly.

From her perspective, the post disappeared, and then you never posted anything like that again! Everyone wins

ChrisMarshallNY3• 11 months ago

I had a relative threaten his daughter, because her daughter-in-law posted some political stuff he disagreed with.

Basically, he had been helping her out financially, and pulled it, because she refused to sanction her daughter-in-law on his behalf.

dlock17• 11 months ago

TIL Kendrick Lamar has a HN (/s)

derefr3• 11 months ago

I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks.

The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by trying to draw attention to themselves to make friends, they would also draw the attention of these scary predators.

Modern social networks have the "dark forest problem" insofar as your mom, or your boss — or the HR departments of random companies you might in the future apply to work for — might be able to join, follow you, and see your posts. In this analogy, your mom/boss/bigcorp-HR are the predators lurking in the Dark Forest. Knowing they're there makes you go silent, refusing to "make yourself known" / "make yourself vulnerable" in any way these predators might potentially latch onto.

The analogy does break down a bit, because unlike alien civilizations in the cosmic void, there are signals we as individuals can send out on a social network that "make us known" at least somewhat but don't "make us vulnerable." These are the "performative, groomed" posts you see shared on Facebook, posted on public Instagram accounts, blogged on LinkedIn, etc. (I suppose a more-precise name, that incorporates this consideration, would be the "chaperone problem" — but that's less evocative.)

Social networks are good and fun and easy — possibly even a net positive for mental health — when they either inherently or coincidentally avoid becoming a dark forest.

In real-world terms:

• Interest-based activity groups (think "knitting circle" or "D&D group"), and community [not professional] sports leagues, are great social networks.

• Conventions, youth summer camps, and adult workshops [think "pottery class"] are all also great — though ephemeral — social networks.

• Group therapy sessions are good social networks.

• A high school is — perhaps shockingly — a decent social network. (It has failure modes, yes, but it almost never fails in the dark-forest sense of "nobody ends up making any friends because everyone's too scared to talk.") And a college is a slightly better social network — not as good at producing friendships, but the friendships are more likely to last beyond the years you spend there.

Good online examples of social networks are mostly older: the single-interest phpBB forums; early online games, before ELO-based matchmaking; and, yeah, old Facebook. (And MySpace, too.)

• I think Tumblr is probably the oldest major "modern" social network that hasn't yet succumbed to the dark forest problem. Not sure why. (Maybe it's just never attracted the right sort of celebrity posters to give moms or bosses any reason to join, I guess. Or maybe the fact that Tumblr posts (used to?) have public web URLs, meant that viral-meme Tumblr posts could simply be linked to, without that then forcing visitors to join the platform? Or maybe the fact that Tumblr lets users have multiple blogs each — sort of like how YouTube accounts can have multiple YouTube channels each; so Tumblr users can have one "clean" blog tied to their identity, that they can show people, and then other blogs that they post more outré — yet meaningful and vulnerable — stuff to. But without these being true "alts", as account DMs can still only originate from the main-blog identity.)

• BlueSky has also avoided the dark forest problem for now, but that's likely temporary; there's nothing in its design that makes it any less "for everybody" + "for public performance" than Twitter is/was.

Everything else is either a ghost town save for its performative stage (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, even HN somewhat); or it's an archipelago of out-of-band-formed groups of mutuals who are otherwise private and undiscoverable through the platform itself (Instagram, all group-chat apps); or it's not a "social network" at all, in that there is an expectation of anonymity / creating alt accounts / being able to (Reddit, 4chan, modern online games.)

It'd be interesting to design a social network from the ground up with the goal of making it inherently impossible for the network to devolve into a dark forest.

Velorivox2• 11 months ago

You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis:

“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”

not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions

Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

xp842• 11 months ago

I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.

So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”

para_parolu• 11 months ago

The best social network I ever used was private one with a few thousand users. Over time you just know most active users.

Jbird2k• 11 months ago

Telegram is a platform where you can connect with people on a small scale

brentjanderson• 11 months ago

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

saubeidl• 11 months ago

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

andai2• 11 months ago

That's a great point. In the mid 2000s I remember thinking about this. "You don't talk to your parents the same way you talk to your friends. So it's like, you are different people to different people."

dghlsakjg6• 11 months ago

This meshes deeply with "The medium is the message" from McLuhan.

doctorpangloss• 11 months ago

Ha ha, the authors says do things that don’t scale, but he used Gemini to write that cliche prose.

jszymborski• 11 months ago

This is sorta something people are discovering with Mastodon. Lots of instances are realizing it's better to cap registrations before they get too large and just have someone spin up another instance.

You sorta get the best of both worlds with Fedi. I'm glad I get to go down hashtag rabbit holes or see boosts from other instances, but I recognize names from my local instance and I feel comfortable we mostly agree on norms and moires which makes folks trust the moderation more (although maybe I'm biased, I'm on the trust and safety team of my instance).

30minAdayHN• 11 months ago

Once a sister of my friend messaged me asking to take down a picture of him with a beer mug. It was because they were looking for matches for him (Indian wedding). I said no and told her that it is better to lose such a match :p

At this point, my network is bunch of 'aunts' and 'uncles'. I take secret pleasure by posting stuff that irks them :)

ajsnigrutin• 11 months ago

Google + solved this issue with 'circles' or whatever it was called.

For me, facebook died when they replaced the user generated content with random garbage and links. Same with instagram, when photos of sunsets and plates of food turned to random videos of people I don't know.

The total number of people on the site never mattered to me, the user content getting replaced with random stuff made it.. well.. "unsocial", and we had other sites for that (digg->reddit, stumbleupon etc.)

tombert• 11 months ago

SomethingAwful is still fun precisely because they don't have too many people. At any given time, there's about ~2500 active users, which is enough to keep the chats funny and interesting and avoiding "dead mall" vibes, but not so much that it's horrible like LinkedIn or Facebook.

Seanambers• 11 months ago

At some point, everyone on Facebook realized almost at the same time, that it was no longer a place to share, but a place to compete.

Then everyone basically stopped sharing and started curating.

andai2• 11 months ago

"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too."

—xkcd 1320

xgkickt3• 11 months ago

Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.

Kibranoz• 11 months ago

Open source your apps so other people can use it and host it on their own if they want.

Some non profits also hosts popular open source server - client software

easton• 11 months ago

It would grab the photo, grab the caption, and send it through a direct mail API to my mom.

Anyone know what API they are talking about? If I could quickly email a photo somewhere and have it appear as a 4x6 in my mailbox in a few days i would have a much cooler fridge.

derwiki5• 11 months ago

There are a few but I use directmailers.com!

gbear605• 11 months ago

If you search “physical mail API”, I see several options. The first one that I saw charged $1 per letter.

pikseladam• 11 months ago

Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project

prisenco• 11 months ago

I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.

Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.

celaleddin• 11 months ago

Interesting and lovely to see ekşi sözlük getting mentioned on HN (even though I remember seeing ssg on HN before if I remember correctly).

I'm curious if there are any similar (in the vein of Douglas Adams' "Guide to the Galaxy") websites with a geographically wider adoption, basically its English version.

I remember İTÜ Sözlük changing its brand to Instela to go somewhat global. But looks like they failed.

I also remember seeing a "Guide" in some Douglas Adams related website, but it wasn't really an active website as far as I remember.

samdixon• 11 months ago

This reads like a LinkedIn post

manoDev2• 11 months ago

The cost to build is so low now.

The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.

priyanmuthu• 11 months ago

If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.

manoDev2• 11 months ago

Yes – but when people say "AI", most often they are talking about the latest OpenAI/Claude development.

nine_k3• 11 months ago

Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?

conradev• 11 months ago

I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.

6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.

nine_k3• 11 months ago

It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.

Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.

A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...

hgomersall• 11 months ago

Most businesses make enough money but not necessarily a lot of money. Slightly fewer make decent money. It's not that common for a business to make its founders "a lot" of money.

95% of businesses are classed as micro in the UK. Small and micro is 99%.

deepfriedbits• 11 months ago

I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.

TomWhitwell• 11 months ago

An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

supportengineer• 11 months ago

If I was a successful billionaire, and I didn’t want any competition, I would tell all the young smart people to go play in a different field

ggambetta• 11 months ago

In my double life as an actor, I've written some software that greatly simplifies the main day to day task of running a talent agency. Its ~15 users love it to death, but that's it, it has a total of ~15 users. It's my happy little project.

Could it be useful to more people? Almost certainly, and at some point I considered running it as a service, and I even had a few trial users. But then I realized that dealing with GDPR compliance and the like wasn't going to be as fun, so in the end it remained an internal project.

pimlottc• 11 months ago

I agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.

j3th9n• 11 months ago

Than you probably never used ChatGPT for coding.

bravesoul23• 11 months ago

It's like we have a 3D printer where before there was only injection molding.

topaz02• 11 months ago

This was my first thought as well -- even some of the examples in the post are pre-llm.

theropost• 11 months ago

But what if everything scales but what if no matter how complicated how obscure how mundane how niche what if everything I mean everything scales

krapp• 11 months ago

Everything I mean everything doesn't scale.

aetherson2• 11 months ago

I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games.

There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have.

But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different settlement icons. I wanted to have more variations of hills and mountains than most of the other sites do.

And if I'm ever missing a feature on this thing, I can just add it, rather than just sort of saying, "Oh well."

Because it's an app that's just for me, I don't need to worry about scale or security or monetization or anything.

It took me about an hour to two hours of my attention (spread out over two calendar days) to have the AI code it.

lionkor• 11 months ago

Is it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?

aetherson2• 11 months ago

It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.

I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.

zer00eyz• 11 months ago

This is a chord, this is another chord, this is a third chord.

Now start a band.

I dont think tech ever expected to have a "punk" phase but this is it. Do the math on how big your app has to be to make 240k a year (before tax). Now host that on something reasonable (not aws/cloud markup trash) and you can make a comfortable living. Payment processing apple/google store or square or ... CS, you dont need it any more! Accounting: software for that and a once a year with a professional. Payroll and insurance: there is a platform for that if you want to go into business with friends. Incorporation: tons of online tools will hand hold you through the process.

Your startup doesn't need to be a unicorn, it needs to pay for YOU.

pcald• 11 months ago

Reminds me of Maciej Ceglowski’s seminal “Barely Succeed: It’s Easier”

https://youtu.be/5Vt8zqhHe_c?si=Etv3Gz5f0bfAw6gM

YetAnotherNick2• 11 months ago

Growth would make it worse, not better.

Worse for the company as a whole, yes. But for individuals involved it is generally better. Employees get to cash in, founders or people who like early stage can and often do start something small again, new employees like structure and better work life balance, and investors get their return.

salomonk_mur2• 11 months ago

Only in theory. Most times none of those stakeholders get anything but wages and recognition.

YetAnotherNick2• 11 months ago

What do you mean by anything?

halfi• 11 months ago

jonovate• 11 months ago

"A few strangers from the Orange Site signed up"

Is that us?

Ironic this made it to the top of HN.

alexchantavy• 11 months ago

Guess it better scale then :-)

TN1ck• 11 months ago

Had a similar thought recently: With the advent of AI, custom software became extremely attainable. DHI syndrome suddenly becomes less of an issue - and can actually become a perk, as you build the most minimal software that works for your org, skipping potential vendor / saas fees. Really curious how the landscape of software will change in the next years due to that.

anonzzzies• 11 months ago

I find running a company over 50 people not nice. We had a few 1000 and it just really sucks imho.

iancmceachern• 11 months ago

Check out the book "Small Giants, companies that choose to be great not big"

ChrisMarshallNY3• 11 months ago

We have published an iOS app that is a utility for a relatively small demographic. It's been on the App Store since January, and we have a bit over 1,000 users. I don't really expect it to get more than a couple of thousand.

I did test it with 12,000 users (fake ones), so it should handle small scales, but it will definitely have to be rewritten, for much larger scales. It would not be as usable, in that case. At this scale, it works very well, indeed.

That's fine. It works great, and we vet every signup, so we're not interested at all in scaling.

TZubiri• 11 months ago

This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.

But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/mo VPS that can do more cpu cycles in a second than the amount of words I have ever spoken, I want project 24 and 76 to take off, so I can kill all the others if they are too time consuming. I want to be greeted through SSH with a message telling me that I haven't logged in for 3400 days and coincidentally have that be the uptime, I want to check the balance of the stripe account with that single purpose LLC to be like 874$, even if I fail I want to at least go for the moonshot.

To each their own I guess.

bravesoul23• 11 months ago

Lol I agree. But I was thinking by "dont scale" to scratch my itch and never release it. That is more worthwhile now.

overgard• 11 months ago

Nitpick, but having side projects you don’t plan to scale isn’t anything unique to the AI era

sowbug• 11 months ago

The cost-benefit analysis has changed. It's now easier to build something indulgently complex -- something of larger scale than a "side project" -- for just a few people.

legendofbrando• 11 months ago

I think this is precisely right. Like 100% correct. No notes. Exactly nails it.

tomasphan• 11 months ago

This is absolutely true and the reason I left a job in software consulting. The future is asking an LLM to write anything for you. It will figure out the tech stack, hosting, integrations etc. “I am looking for an alternative to Discord” is now “make me a Discord clone for my friends and I”.

Quality of the code aside because now it doesn’t have to support millions of users anymore.

101008• 11 months ago

I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc.

People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.

jpgleeson• 11 months ago

Robin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

SamInTheShell• 11 months ago

Vibe coding isn’t going to net you horizontal scalability out of the box if you know nothing about scalable system architecture. These models have more examples of single node wonder codebases than they do for real world application of algorithms like Paxos or RAFT. That being said I let Claude Sonnet 4 eat my GHC premium creds a few weeks back to see if it could figure out multiraft in Go. The short answer is just no, without doing an entire refresher on where it went wrong.

It doesn’t really matter though. If you target a DB like Yugabyte and use distributed storage like an s3 bucket or minio, you can get pretty far as long as you keep the core components memory efficient and stateless.

aussieguy1234• 11 months ago

I have a bunch of little projects that benefit me personally and professionally in a number of ways.

I keep them private because for a lot of them, if others had access to the same tools, my tool assisted efforts in these areas would become ineffective if others were all doing the same thing as me.

Its only a small few tools that i'll actually share with the world.

dented42• 11 months ago

Was scaling ever the point?

badlogic• 11 months ago

Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.

I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.

[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...

uludag2• 11 months ago

I 100% agree with everything in this article, though I'm confused what AI has to do with any of this. People have been doing this sort of thing long before LLMs arrived. Weekend projects doing cool things where definitely a thing long before LLMs. I'd say that cloud services (e.g. Twilio) were the real enablers to these sorts of projects so it seems wrong to be crediting LLMs with this type of work.

Cloud services get us from completely impossible to doable with a small amount of work. LLMs maybe save us the time of reading a tutorial or documentation.

mikewarot2• 11 months ago

The LLMs come in as an enabler to get over "white page" paralysis, and/or overwhelming amounts of libraries to learn to use.

Earlier today, I was chatting with the folks in my computer club, discussing how I wrote a little program just to explore the nature of small neural networks. Then I decided to show them how I use Visual Studio Code with ChatGPT5 (from my GitHub subscription)

The next thing you know, I had a bare bones computerized bulletin board system accessible via telnet, up and running in Python, just as an example of what's possible.

Next was a small database to scan and catalog all the videos on a disk drive, with an SQLite backend. I added a web interface to it in a few minutes, thanks to the LLM.

All of this while I'm a barely passable Python programmer... my preferred language is Delph/Free Pascal.

Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial. Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code... but I can live with less than 1000 lines of legacy code for myself, and nobody else. I might even study it, and learn some things. ;-)

visarga• 11 months ago

Things that were previously overwhelming are now almost trivial.

Not if you have to stake your career on them. AI takes no liability, it is all yours

intended• 11 months ago

Thank you for putting in clear info about the language, task and results! I’m going to add that you have likely been programming forever.

I am beginning to suspect that the ability to get value out of GenAI is almost entirely dependent on the ability to recognize bad patterns at a glance.

In essence, it’s a tool for power users, not for neophytes.

Good lord, its going to be the excel problem on steroids.

skylurk• 11 months ago

To be fair, some of that is the python:

https://xkcd.com/353/

uludag2• 11 months ago

I totally get the point your trying to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think it's unfair/misleading that anything with a veneer of LLMs has all the credit driven to the LLM and not to the thing that provides the bulk of the value.

Like for example, clearly you are a very experienced developer with a vast amount of experience. To say that the extent and reach to which you are able to apply technologies is because LLMs seems wrong; it's your rich technical background which allow you to use LLMs in an effective manner.

baq• 11 months ago

Sure, it's effectively instant legacy code

I call this ‘mass produced software’. I walk into a software shop, ask for software and get more or less what I need at barely acceptable quality just like at Walmart.

Vibe coding? Perhaps it’s just shopping.

jatora• 11 months ago

The amount that can be prototyped is astronomically higher with LLM's, which lowers the barrier to do these things and troubleshoot libraries/architectures. Naturally the amount of hobby projects has exploded multiple OOM's beyond what was done before, regardless of any gatekeeping you wish you could do :P

gus_tpm• 11 months ago

I don't think they were trying to gatekeep. They were just saying that it shouldn't not be concluded to be because of llms

quitit• 11 months ago

In a way this is how AI can help us return to doing things for interest, pleasure or creativity.

Now my hobbies and experiments don't need to make money, some might, but I don't have any pressure to only allocate time to things that I know I can turn into an income stream, or worse steer it's natural development to the $.

I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.

I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.

mmmmbbbhb• 11 months ago

It's crazy that medium.com has an SSR hydration issue that just goes unfixed for years.

wiradikusuma• 11 months ago

We can vibe code crazy stuff and this still a problem? I guess our job is safe :)

deafpolygon• 11 months ago

You realize that as the amount of people vibe-coding goes up, the “quality” of the data llms are trained on are going to drop.

nicbou• 11 months ago

I call it “move slow and fix things”.

Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining.

This has been my business for almost a decade. I love when I find other people with similar focus. My latest find is shottr.cc.

ffitch• 11 months ago

Hey, I’m the author of Shottr. It’s super gratifying to know that there are people who see the app that way : ) thank you for saying this!

Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

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