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Comment by mianos | Hacker News Reader

This may have been true back in the times of the applications (when I was also a developer), but, speaking from 40+ years of experience myself. I agree, most significant projects need more than one person. There may be outliers, but back then it was the normal, now it's not.

Also consider games, back then one or two guys could do a game, now all but the outliers are done by large teams.

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>Also consider games, back then one or two guys could do a game, now all but the outliers are done by large teams.

If anything the opposite is true. Gamedev tooling is now so good and high level one or two people can make sophisticated games, in terms of audio, gameplay and visuals that an entire team could not make in the 80s or 90s.

Just one example, Signalis (https://rose-engine.org/signalis/). One developer and one artist if I'm not mistaken, stunning game that in say 2000 would have been a release from a major publisher.

There's a narrative around game budgets and timelines that seems to assume that they're increasing due to it being inherently more expensive to create them. The reality is that the technology has massively raised the potential output of a small team & that increasing budgets are an economic decision - selling a small game that takes players' attention away from your GaaS omnigame is inefficient. And you need to take it away from Fortnite while also competing with excellent games that are free.

Stardew Valley!

If there are outliers you can't make an absolute statement.

I would also add that with LLM assistance, one person being able to create a "significant" app is actually more likely today than five years ago.

It's not an absolute statement, you'd have to have a childish interpretation of the article to have that takeaway. Not every generalization needs a "well actually".

Feel free to come back to us when you have an actual example. The days of one person languages might be over, but we haven't seen any language created using a LLM yet. Much less one people complain about.

I'm writing a language by myself so for me at least the days of one person languages are not over. And I have the joy of working with a language no one complains about ;)

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