How to deal with "vibecoding depression" of indie hackers6 jul 2026<br>How to deal with "vibecoding depression" of indie hackers

I see a lot of depressed messages all around the software engineer side of the internet.

Our skill was largely democratized by AI. Anyone with some technical, design or product building experience can build apps, and we can’t gatekeep them anymore.

Tons of apps are flowing into the internet and app stores. A lot of them work badly, some of them look bad, and few are actually good.

But they are here, either competing with our work or not busy creating work contracts for us.

For people like me, whose hobby outside of my day job was working on my own apps, this may seem like even more devastating news. I’ve spent human-years making apps, thinking that someday this will be my career.

In this post I will explain why I consider democratizing our work a good thing, why I believe a relatively simple app made by real people will continue to thrive, and why I’m not sad about “wasted time”.

What we were actually doing all the time

Let me start from a distance: what is the goal of “making apps”, “SaaS”, “CRUD” and being a software engineer in general?

When I studied in university, my course was called “Information Resource Management”. I always considered this name a random buzzword, unrelated to my education that mixed business, economy and shallow dive into computer science.

With years of experience I found out that the name actually was very on point. The exact moment when I realized this was during an argument with my grandfather, a very experienced bureaucrat, who rejected some of my points saying: “if everyone was sitting in the office in front of a computer, we would have nothing to eat”.

Here came the realisation: all the multibillion companies, including the most real-world ones — Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash — don’t do much in the physical world. Their engineers are busy doing CRUD on data. No engineer carries a person from A to B, or maintains an apartment.

What we were doing all the time wasn’t “solving real-world problems”. What we were actually doing is multiplying real-world work via automated CRUDing of data.

But a trillion times zero is still zero — and the zero-or-not comes from people in the offline world. This offline work is the product.

This real work can be multiplied by 10 when organised via the most primitive information system as simple as ink & paper, by 100 when it’s done in Excel, the most generalized information system, and by 100500 multiplied by 9000 when it is done in a tailored, computerized information system.

That’s what business wants. That’s what we do. That’s our work.

The world we lived in before was not normal

A few years ago, the hottest topic in tech was Pieter Levels – a guy in shorts and no t-shirt, who was making thousands of dollars a month by making ugly and buggy CRUD apps with PHP & jQuery.

What he did was brute-force tons of app ideas via making very barebones apps, and this enlarged luck surface, multiplied by an ever-growing subscriber count, resulted in making a few simple but very profitable apps.

Set aside his huge audience, and it sounded like a plan anyone could copy. “SaaS indiehacking craze” became a lasting hot topic in the engineering world.

But please, hear me out

All this success was a symptom of an unhealthy situation. Everyone needed apps to multiply their business output. But only a few, The Engineers™, were able to make those apps.

This imbalance between huge demand for tailored information systems and limited supply of people who can craft them gave birth to a privileged class of “CRUD makers”.

They could make a minimal, barely working, CRUD app that solved a pain-point™, and businesses hungry for informational systems tailored to their niche began lining up to sign up for the annual tax-deductible subscription.

This was great for the “rich from making forms” engineer, but it wasn’t healthy. And this was acknowledged long before AI: “no code” soaked up venture capital, n8n and Zapier became tools of the common folk, and Excel has been the people’s information system since the 80s.

What I’m trying to say in this section is that you should clearly distinguish when you are sad not because of the “death of craft”, but because the era of golden software shovels is gone. And the new era is better for everyone.

The secret ingredient of a CRUD app

Another discussion that emerged from this topic is TaStE. Everyone decided plain CRUD is no longer enough — now you need tasteful CRUD to succeed. Also everyone found that they are lucky holders of this unique “taste” and talent, and that their CRUD apps are already tasty. Yum!

Taste is a stupid term. But disregarding the surrounding idea and agreeing that barebones CRUD apps are dead may lead you into a depressing thought – that only REAL software is one made by x100000 engineers.

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