Ask HN: What are independent software contractors doing now?
I've been doing independent software contracting for the past year or two, and I've noticed a dramatic drop in opportunities. I used to find one or two leads a week, but now I'm getting none for months. It seems like with AI, people are no longer willing to hire developers for their pet projects. Has anyone else experienced this? What are you doing now?
Off-topic but is there any independent study that has documented impact of AI on contractual work for software devs?
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?
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.
> 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.