The phrase I keep coming back to is "studio of one" — partly because it sounds nicer than "solo founder," and partly because it's literally true. There is one office. There is one chair. There is one person to ask when something breaks.
This was, until pretty recently, a bad idea. Running a software business alone meant being three full-time jobs at once, and being mediocre at all of them. The math didn't work. You either hired, or you accepted that the work would suffer.
What changed
The honest answer: the floor moved. The things I used to be bad at — writing copy that didn't sound like me, drafting reasonable-looking legal pages, scaffolding a build pipeline I'd never set up before — got cheap. Not in some sci-fi sense. In a "I sat down on a Tuesday morning and was done by noon" sense.
The bet isn't that AI replaces the work. It's that AI replaces the friction around the work — and the friction is what made one-person studios mediocre.
What didn't change is the part I actually like. Deciding what an app should feel like. Choosing the words that go on the screen. Sitting with a design for three days because something is off and I don't know what yet. Those still take the same amount of time, and I still want them to.
What "factory" doesn't mean
I'm wary of the "AI factory" framing. It implies an assembly line. Apps coming off a conveyor, identical, the way content farms grind out blog posts.
That's not what's happening here, and not what I want. The leverage isn't in shipping more — it's in shipping with care, at a cadence one person can maintain, without either burning out or hiring. Three apps a year, made well, by someone who answers the support email himself. That's the shape of the thing.
How it's going
Honestly? Mostly fine. The hard parts are the human parts: deciding when to stop, deciding what's done, sitting with the discomfort of something being shipped before it's perfect. None of that has been automated, and I don't think I'd want it to be.
I'll keep writing about it as I figure it out. If you want to follow along, the RSS feed is the least annoying way.
Last updated April 19, 2026.