Sebastian shared this paragraph in his recent devlog that resonated with me:
Focus is the new bottleneck. I kept coming back to this thought all week, and it finally crystallized: code isn’t the barrier anymore. Modern AI tooling lets me build pretty much anything I can clearly describe. The thing that separates indie devs who ship from those who don’t is now almost entirely about focus and consistency. People who can keep their attention on one thing, week after week, are the ones who win in this new world. You have all the tools you need. The only thing you have to defend is your attention.
This sums up my personal experience as well. Writing code has become a commodity that is now possible even for people with no programming experience at all (at least to a certain degree). And people who do know how to code have gotten a powerful multiplier for their own skills.
Why aren’t great apps and startups being launched left and right?
Because the craft of making polished software requires qualities that are still inherently human and not automatable: taste, a vision and the ability to take things past 80% done. These are the true differentiators, not the code that gets generated in a couple of sessions.
And they can only be reached if you put in your focused time and consistently iterate.
Which also means that saying no to ideas remains important. Just because you can build more now, doesn’t mean you should.
This David Allen quote sums up the dilemma well:
You can do anything, but not everything.
Even more so in the age of little robots inside your terminal.