Pros and cons of solo development

https://johnjeffers.com/pros-and-cons-of-solo-development/

by johnj-hn • 16 days ago

110 76 16 days ago

twosdai• 16 days ago

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. ---

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.

johnj-hn9• 16 days ago

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.

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.

moriero• 16 days ago

maybe a little bit of telemetry that is meant to inform the developer is OK

i assume most people are just against the ad-driven telemetry

t1234s• 16 days ago

Any tips if you have been a solo dev for a very long term (20+ years) for getting hired as part of a team?

dofm4• 16 days ago

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.

scrappy_guy• 16 days ago

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.

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.

goosejuice• 16 days ago

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 :).

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.

dofm4• 16 days ago

Lessons from my failure:

- do everything you can to keep burnout at bay

- you do, in fact, need a holiday

- hyperfocus is not your friend, ever; if you feel you can’t put it down, you must put it down

- never delete emails; the one thing you can guarantee is that you will need an email you deleted

- 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

- you might be selling your abilities but you should never rely on them yourself; you do need systems

- you can fall out of love with the thing you are best at

- listen to your friends when they sell your talents; if they say you can do a thing, who are you to argue?

- three days of fully billable work per week is already too risky to gamble on, so:

- you are not charging enough

- YOU ARE NOT CHARGING ENOUGH

- FFS do you even listen? You’re not charging enough

jdwyah• 16 days ago

always this.

I had a $5/month thing. Made a $20/month option that barely had more features. Sold lotsa seats.

Rewrote it. $10 and $50 plans. $50 is most popular.

But a day after I launched I got a new payment for $360. Damn, I thought, Claude must've screwed something up.

Nope, just somebody going straight into the Yearly option of the $50 (that I hadn't realized Claude added (with a discount)).

dofm4• 16 days ago

Someone told me that you have to have more expensive plans for people to have the confidence to try your cheap plans, which is sort of upside down at first glance and then you think, oh no, I'm like that. It's true.

chilli_axe• 16 days ago

I’d love to hear more about your experience, particularly with the point on hyperfocus - this is something I struggle to find a healthy relationship with.

dofm4• 16 days ago

Ultimately I have burned out and I am struggling to put myself back together; I can no longer direct or control my focus at all, I forget tasks and I tire after relatively short periods. It’s non-functional.

Do anything you can do to not get to this point, because at times I have wanted my life to just stop. I am recovering and it’s better than it was but I have no picture of my future because I feel so unlike myself, and I have to plan for a life for this new guy I appear to be, who forgets stuff and doesn’t feel like the person his friends knew so he just stays in. I spent three days not answering messages over the weekend, hiding from my two most constant friends, because it’s more than I can do.

What I have learned about myself now, post-burnout, is that I get more done if I treat that internal emotional hyperfocus “pull” to carry on with something fascinating as a sign that I should put the work down. It’s better on average to assume that in fact the urge to carry on (because it has become really fun) kicks in when you have already done enough for one day or whatever. If I stop there, things are better. Because the stupidity cycle doesn’t start. I sleep better, I eat better (and earlier in the evening), it’s easier to restart tasks in the morning because I am more likely to have left something enjoyable or well-defined to do!

Hyperfocus isn’t a superpower. It’s more like a drug; a destructive pattern I must try not to seek out.

I almost certainly have ADHD, obviously.

When I think things are going really great, when I am buzzing, I am already neglecting something else important; housework, paying overdue bills, laundry, none of it is in the zone with me. But everyone else at work thinks I am productive so they love it; they don’t see the damage being done. Pretty soon everything will get out of control, and then some tiny uncertainty will block my focus, derail me and there it all is; I am an incompetent person living in chaos and I can’t get started on any of it.

One day you will have a series of terrible overlapping deadlines, and you won’t be able to find that hyperfocus lock-in. On that day you instead begin to rely on the extreme stress to make you function, and you are now subsidising work by drawing down on your future health.

ramshanker• 16 days ago

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."

Smaller ideas need not be approved, 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".

mooreds• 16 days ago

Yeah, the small bits of sand in the gears is something that is hard to sell when you allocating engineering effort. But it adds up over time.

It makes the difference between a tool that is a pleasure to use and one that causes dread.

satvikpendem11• 16 days ago

A team can do the same, it's based on management structure, not the existence of a team.

rgbrgb• 16 days ago

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.

smashini• 16 days ago

Part of the cons is offset, if the single maintainer dissapears, nothing a fork can't fix :)

neovintage• 16 days ago

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!

johnj-hn9• 16 days ago

Yeah I understand what you're saying here. Some of that is just me dealing with imposter syndrome. I pretty much know what a good app looks like, and I have definitely been through a lot of iterations to get Luxury Yacht to where it is today. Thanks.

jdw64• 16 days ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

lelanthran3• 16 days ago

The rule to remember about solo development: Alone I can go faster, together we can go further!

Everything else boils down to this.

johnj-hn9• 16 days ago

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

lelanthran3• 16 days ago

Perhaps. I think AI changes the equation here. Honestly, AI changes what "solo developer" even means.

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.

jambalaya82• 16 days ago

I agree. It sure does change what it means.

the_gipsy• 16 days ago

With AI, we can go... somewhere?

JamesSwift• 16 days ago

No, AI dials up the OPs axiom to 11. Heavily leveraging AI for dev is going to accelerate you as a solo dev but you will hit serious friction trying to scale to more than the individual.

satvikpendem11• 16 days ago

I agree. If everyone on my team is just prompting agents, why would I spend money on their salary when I can use that for tokens instead? No one has yet given a good answer for this question when I've asked before.

throw939393• 16 days ago

Team just eats your runway, and adds shit ton of overhead.

Plus it is much healthier to have a social life outside of work. Talk about something else, no algos!

MattDamonSpace• 16 days ago

“We need to go far, fast”

tonyedgecombe• 16 days ago

We already run a marathon by turning it into a series of sprints.

jambalaya82• 16 days ago

Go too far, get lost, good luck finding your way back.

marcosdumay• 16 days ago

Together we can go further, but the more of us there are, the least we can deviate from the paved road.

chris_fullcycle• 15 days ago

The problem is when you have the wrong team. It's way too easy to partner with the wrong person, and not even know until years later.

I'm finding that yes, it takes longer on my own, I can have AI do much of the stuff for me that I don't want to do.

esafak• 16 days ago

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.

So add telemetry and a request tracker like https://www.productboard.com/. This is not a solo vs team thing.

johnj-hn9• 16 days ago

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.

I don't really need to know how many people use the app. It would be cool to know, but not necessary.

If someone wants a feature, or a fix, they can open an issue.

satvikpendem11• 16 days ago

Then that's not really a con if you refuse to fix the problem you yourself mentioned. It's like saying, I'm not getting enough iron in my diet, and someone suggests eating foods with more iron, and then saying I don't want to. Okay, then don't bring it up in the first place.

sublinear2• 16 days ago

Most projects don't need telemetry. They need better logs.

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?

On the frontend... What's so hard about wrapping all your event listeners and periodically sending those logs back to your server?

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.

efromvt2• 16 days ago

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).

phendrenad2• 16 days ago

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.

ryandrake• 16 days ago

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.

majicDave• 16 days ago

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.

vadchen2• 16 days ago

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.

james_ross2• 16 days ago

this issue resonates for me very much, as a one person startup experimenter in 2026 like a whole bunch of other people. I have a day job with lots of human interaction, but I've been trying to find the edges of what's possible as a single person on my fun side project, and I still haven't found them. I built a product in 3 months, and then wondered if I could commercialise it in another three, which I've now done. The unlock for me was an agent framework a friend made that allows me to "hire" collaborators that don't just take orders, but push back, do research and challenge my thinking. I've made a virtual head of product, a virtual head of marketing, a chhief of staff, etc, and can only say I've been blown away by what they've added to my thinking and my capabilities. They totally reframed my approach to building my web site, choosing a commercial back end, and commencing the marketing journey. It's not magic, but it encodes a management philosophy that resonates with me and I still have no idea where the limits are with what I can do alone... https://github.com/normannoble/agent-framework

vadchen2• 14 days ago

Sounds interesting, is it similar to BMAD Method personas?

tiffanyh• 16 days ago

One of the biggest benefits I see AI bringing is to solo development.

Not because it’ll make you faster (which it can).

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.

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.

AI can be your helper in those times of need.

stdatomic• 16 days ago

I really wanted to work on making a niche game with one other person. Never found that person.

KashifNY• 16 days ago

Its a journey and you learn a alot, thats when naturally you learn that you cant handle a huge ship solo :)

Pros and cons of solo development

Related Stories