Building things for yourself is fun -- I do it. But the original article was written for startup founders, building companies.
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.
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...
I agree that not everything has to go huge. I don’t see how ChatGPT has anything to do with this though.
> 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
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
An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Reminds me of Maciej Ceglowski’s seminal “Barely Succeed: It’s Easier”
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.
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.
It's crazy that medium.com has an SSR hydration issue that just goes unfixed for years.
Check out the book "Small Giants, companies that choose to be great not big"
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 $.
I liken it to early painters and composers. What originally started as their passion and creative expression had led these artists onto the path of "poor starving artist". The realisation comes quickly that doing something to your maximum effort means that it also needs to be the breadwinner. The hope for AI is that it is able to rapidly fulfil the breadwinning side of things, leaving time for the artist to extend beyond their previous limitation.
I certainly see this already with how I use AI. I leave it to do the arduous work while I work on the bigger idea.
This is all well, if you want to be a hacker and spend 100s of hours migrating a hack that sends a postal card to your mom, that's a nice hobby.
But I want obscene amounts of wealth that would make my accountant uneasy, I want 10K DAU running against a single 10$/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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Nitpick, but having side projects you don’t plan to scale isn’t anything unique to the AI era
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.
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
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
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.
Lol I agree. But I was thinking by "dont scale" to scratch my itch and never release it. That is more worthwhile now.
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.
I find running a company over 50 people not nice. We had a few 1000 and it just really sucks imho.
This reads like a LinkedIn post
I think this is precisely right. Like 100% correct. No notes. Exactly nails it.
>"A few strangers from the Orange Site signed up"
Is that us?
Ironic this made it to the top of HN.
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
Was scaling ever the point?
Hi
> 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.
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...
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.