45 days lurking here and I'm starting to think AI is making this harder for us, not easier
I came here 45 days ago planning to eventually post my own product. I kept it quiet, just read and commented. The plan was to learn the room first.
What actually happened is I lost the patience to read the feed.
Not all at once. It crept up. Around week 3 I noticed I was skimming faster. By week 5 I was opening the subreddit and closing it within 30 seconds. And I want to be careful here because the obvious explanation is just that I got bored, my novelty wore off, classic redditor arc. but I don't think that's what's happening.
The volume of "I built X with Claude and Supabase in a weekend, what do you think" posts hasn't just gone up. The posts themselves are converging. Same stack, same screenshot style, same value-prop structure, sometimes literally the same color palette. It's like watching the search results when you type the same prompt into ten different IDEs.
Which made me start thinking about something uncomfortable. The pitch for AI as a builder tool was always "now small teams can compete with big ones." But I think the actual effect on indie devs might be the opposite. AI gave everyone the same 10x productivity boost, which means nobody got a relative advantage. Meanwhile the attention pool — the people willing to try a new indie product, leave feedback, become early users — that pool didn't 10x. It stayed roughly the same size, maybe smaller because the same people are now drowning in launches.
So what AI did, structurally, is it accelerated the supply side of the indie market without doing anything to the demand side. Production capacity went up 10x, attention capacity stayed flat, and we're all standing in a market that's getting harder to be seen in every week, not easier.
I don't have a clean conclusion. I'm not saying stop building. I just keep coming back to this question: is the productivity AI gives us actually doing anything useful for us as a group, or are we just all running faster on a treadmill that's speeding up to match? Curious if anyone else here has felt the shift in the last month or two, or if I'm just burnt out and rationalizing.