As someone who has made a living as an Indie developer for 20 years (creating Windows and Mac apps) I feel it is getting harder:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
The other day I saw someone famous(ish) announce a new desktop application, to meaningful reception.
Thirty minutes later I had the same application, in every meaningful way. Built, working, ready for distribution.
It was just a test and I’m not about to sell it, but I can’t see how this doesn’t come down hard on indie developers.
This example produced reasonably done swift using appropriate system libs… so while “slop” will be a thing people might ignore for now, I think the bar has to go way, way up for real developers.
That was not difficult. Though obviously I wouldn’t declare it so and actually ship it to paying people in 30 minutes.
As for the rest of your point, that’s certainly going to be a fair assessment, much of the time, for now.
But that wasn’t really the point. We’re already pretty close to being there on “just tell the machine what you want” for huge swaths of non-critical software. And I don’t think pressure from that is going to let up.
They are linked. LLMs mean reduced barriers and more competition, which makes promotion harder.
It may or may not be a great time to be a popular indie dev, but for the less known folks - it’s a lottery