Some years ago, building a side project meant finding time wherever you could. Late nights, weekends, or early mornings to squeeze in some work before your real job starts.
Any SaaS or app you wanted to build used to take months of this busy schedule until you could launch it. As a result, balancing building a side project with a day job (plus family!) was a challenge that few people were willing to accept.
Now, with tools like Claude Code, the paradigm has shifted. The cost of creating software is much cheaper. What used to take months now takes days. You can do most of your basic features with AI if you use a well-known framework with good standards. But what does this mean?
First, there is a natural big shift in our job market. With less effort to build software, everybody else is experiencing the same benefit, so we’ll need to hire fewer engineers to do the same job we were doing before. I already know great people who are facing hard challenges entering the job market as junior engineers.
If the barrier to launching a software product is lower, more will be in the market, making it harder to succeed. But at this point is where we, as software developers, are wrong; in fact it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur.
As a software developer, coding was never the real barrier to building a successful side business. Without AI, it might have taken longer, but we could still build what we wanted.
The real challenge was—and still is—everything else required to get paying customers. We love staying in our IDEs, shipping yet-one-more-feature to our grand total of zero users. It’s comfortable. It’s safe. It’s familiar.
What’s uncomfortable? Sales calls, cold emails, blog posts echoing in the void, facing rejection, or talking to potential customers (I know, scary!). These are the skills that turn code into revenue, and AI hasn’t fully automated them yet. So the challenges remain for everybody else, too.
The only difference is that now we get a faster feedback loop about the skills we lack to build a business. The sooner we recognize what’s actually holding us back, the sooner we can develop the skills that matter.
AI didn’t remove the obstacles—it just helped us find them faster.