Solo Everything

I’ve been going over some of my old writing lately, trying to assess where I feel I’ve been right, where I’ve been wrong, which convictions I still hold, and which I have let go of.

One almost comically pervasive theme I discovered across all of my writing is a celebration of the extraordinary (and continually increasing) leverage of the individual.

I’m referring to old posts of mine like What gear are you in?, Be proudest of your under-engineering, Leverage often comes in knowing what not to build, Practical vs. correct, and Less code.

When I consider where I was in my life at the time when I wrote these posts, I can see why the topic moved me so much. To be less vague, I was, in turns, working within large organizations, and then for stretches, consulting on either a solo basis or alongside a very small team. I was also working on my own projects and products where time was an extremely limited resource. I saw firsthand how much leverage could be gained by merely being thoughtful about where to direct focus, and by working with simple and robust (if unexciting) tools.

I feel like there is remarkable anxiety in the present moment about “automation” (if that is the appropriate term) - about a reduction in jobs and opportunities due to the increasing capability of technology (with Large Language Models or “LLMs” seeming to have been a significant inflection point) to do what previously only humans could.

I would like to try and articulate a more positive vision of the future, based on my extensive experiences with what I will call, for lack of a better term, “personal productivity optimization” - the same topic I have continued to return to so often in my writing.

First I’d like to make a controversial claim: the ability of an individual, enabled by technology, to be self-reliant (in the sense of not having to rely very much on other people, a larger organization/company/employer, etc.) has been extraordinary - and insufficiently acknowledged - for at least a decade.

I am not speaking only of the lives of software developers. I mean in really most aspects of our lives.

What took hours or days often now takes minutes. Furthermore, we rarely need to rely on others as we would have in the past. Managing one’s portfolio of investments would have, in decades past, required physical meetings or, at very minimum, lengthy phone calls. Now it can all be effectively done by an individual, online, in their spare time, and in most cases with far superior outcomes.

Most of the mundane administrative tasks of our lives have been optimized through the progress of technology such that they now consome zero or mere minutes of our time.

Now to get to the core of my thesis, and the reason for the title of this blog post.

I believe we have entered an era of unprecedented empowerment of the individual.

What does this look like?

Whereas in the past somebody with a novel idea would need to seek funding on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to recruit specialists to augment their own skills and realize their vision, today a single individual is empowered (thanks to the inflection point we have recently reached in the power of LLMs) to execute upon a vision all by themselves at minimal cost.

A developer, for instance, can manage a design process from basic brainstorming and wireframing through to the delivery of polished, finalized designs solely using generative AI tools. They can then leverage tools such as Copilot, Cursor etc. to augment their own development skillset with a more expansive one, and build complete products. They can then leverage LLMs like ChatGPT in customer support functions (perhaps not entirely, but to such an extent as to require far fewer hours of a human support staff’s time).

I feel like a decade ago this was a circumstance I could have only dreamt of. Now that it is here, I believe we shouldn’t indulge in fear and anxiety, but rather embrace the upside: an extraordinary empowerment of the individual.