My observation in my years running a dev shop was that there are two classes of applications that could get built. One was the high-end, full-bore model requiring a team of engineers and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get to a basic MVP, which thus required an economic opportunity in at least the tends of millions. The other, very niche or geographically local businesses that can get their needs met with a self-service tool, max budget maybe $5k or so. Could stretch that to $25k if you use offshore team to customize. But 9/10 incoming leads had budgets between $25k and $100k. We just had to turn them away. There's nothing meaningful you can do with that range of budget. I haven't seen anything particularly change that. Self-service tools get gradually better, but not enough to make a huge difference. The high end if anything has receded even faster as dev salaries have soared.
AI coding, for all its flaws now, is the first thing that takes a chunk out of this, and there is a HUGE backlog of good-but-not-great ideas that are now viable.
That said, this particular story is bogus. He "just wrote the tests" but that's a spec — implementing from a quality executable spec is much more straightforward. Deepseek isn't doing the design, he is. Still a massive accelerant.
AI coding, for all its flaws now, is the first thing that takes a chunk out of this, and there is a HUGE backlog of good-but-not-great ideas that are now viable.
That said, this particular story is bogus. He "just wrote the tests" but that's a spec — implementing from a quality executable spec is much more straightforward. Deepseek isn't doing the design, he is. Still a massive accelerant.