Ask HN: What are independent software contractors doing now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are independent software contractors doing now?

15 pointsMadmallard10 comments

The amount of opportunities I've found doing independent contracting for people in the last year or two has went from easily being able to find one or two leads a week to none at all for several months.

It seems with AI people are just not willing to hire devs for their pet projects anymore?

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Legacy tech work. I get almost no calls for modern dev stacks, but I'm kept as busy fixing and modernizing legacy apps on legacy stacks, and helping to get their data moved to a modern environment.

I'm not drowning in calls or anything - but they come in often enough to keep me working.

You could say not-well-disciplined vibe-coded projects are in the same bucket as legacy apps from day 1, right?

Honestly, no - vibe coded projects that aren't done well never launch. So if you ever reach a "Day 1", you did well enough that you can probably roll with it for a couple years before you need a rescue. And if your business survives those couple years, it means you've hit the market correctly, which should then be able to fund a project to re-architect for sustainability.

Also, vibe coded apps are almost by definition something that an AI can iterate on because it came from an LLM in the first place. Legacy apps tend to exclude LLM-based assistance because the models' training is insufficient on obscure ancient tech stacks.

> It seems with AI people are just not willing to hire devs for their pet projects anymore?

Not willing? Genuinely why would I?

A dev is going to cost more, work slower and be less likely to give me exactly what I ask for.

I don't mean to be blunt, but you need to look for something else to do imo. This isn't 2016.

Why would a dev be less likely to give you exactly what you ask for lmao

that's completely wrong

Maybe like 50% can do a decent job...

Either way, not sure why you would pay a dev over getting a Claude subscription.

Industry shift worth noting seems to be "If AI can do it, I don't need you". So all work available is - I can't get AI to do this. Help me do it.

Off-topic but is there any independent study that has documented impact of AI on contractual work for software devs?

Fixing vibe coded projects? Arguably requires more knowledge than building the usual CRUD app.

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