200,000 software tech layoffs in 5 months.
AI nuked their jobs in just 5 months since the great AI awakening of early 2026.
Let's guess that 50% of these tech people are already using agent frameworks like Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Nothing on earth is more ineffectively clever than a smart person with time on their hands and a bit of savings.
At least 60k semi-technical people were just shot out of a cannon with $60k in severance, a cutting-edge LLM on their laptop — and human hallucinations.
A swarm of noisy wasps is about to attack the SaaS, content, and influencer markets.
App growth in the app stores of Apple, Google, and Shopify is exploding. This is just the beginning.
With the new LLM harnesses and frameworks, the cost of market entry for a semi-decent app is now trivial. I have MANY issues with the quality of LLM code and reasoning, but that's a luxury preference that only mattered when there was a human skill moat around app development. End users can't really intuit this, nor do they even care. Skill is no longer the dominant market currency.
What does this mean for solo app devs and small teams?
Many of us already have working apps with loyal customers. That's a great position to be in, but that might only be a temporary security blanket. It used to mean something to be a solopreneur. It was a unique offering supported in the market. We brought product expertise and talent to a niche, and were rewarded.
Now…the cost of entry for solo app devs has been lowered by 30x. So it just got 30x cheaper/faster to launch an MVP or a low-tech market entry.
100k overall new apps will enter the market across all segments, and everybody needs users, so they will spend on paid media (and influencers), competing viciously for quality ad impressions.
The big funded apps will be forced to spend 2-10X to find new customers.
Ad spend efficiency for SaaS is about to get floored. CTRs will go way down due to ad pollution. CPCs will go up, for sure — and in a brutal way if you're targeting decision makers.
Intra-segment product pollution — expect 1k apps to enter your segment in the next 8 months. To add salt to our wounds, the LLMs, frameworks, and harnesses will eliminate the need for at least 15% of our existing apps.
So how can we plan a path through the noise?
Shit. I'm not really sure.
I just shipped Zero Docs in 5 weeks — which helps app devs and teams build and deploy custom knowledge agents in 10 minutes. Zero Docs is ELITE. Custom RAG, vector search, unique prompts, Google Chrome extension, pre-compiled client bundles, on and on. But that's not going to be enough.
All the time while building, maxing out Claude Code and Codex, exploring Pi and oh-my-pi — I was trying to figure out what all this new power means.
The path forward
We need to start rethinking our position as app developers.
- Network and team is everything — solo is death
- Distribution is essential — content expertise, unfair access to preferential sales channels — or else you will not be able to afford ad spend to find new customers
- Product is still king — solve a big problem so well that people can't live without our app — unfortunately this is a really hard thing to hit, regardless of skill and LLM power
- Focus on the big rivers of money — help others make money in an existing river of big budgets
- Know when to fold 'em — if our app is not working, shut it down! Go help a team that is crushing it — there will be so many teams out here that need our help
- Keep building — no matter what, KEEP BUILDING to stay current — we now have two full-time jobs — 1) builder, 2) learner — AI was meant to help everyone get more efficient, but too bad for us, it's moving at light speed and the only way to a brighter future is to keep peddling our ass off — ZYNs, Diet Cokes, morning HIIT workouts, peptides, brain salts, cigarettes. We're cyborgs now, but the hardware and automation is completely missing.
How do you see it?