What AI can't do for a solo developer

There's a version of the AI hype where solo developers suddenly ship like teams of twenty. I live on the other side of that hype, building products mostly alone, and I can tell you exactly what AI did and didn't change.

What it changed: the speed from idea to first working version. Scaffolding, boilerplate, migrations, config files, that annoying utility function you'd otherwise write by hand — all of it compresses from hours to minutes.

What it didn't change:

• deciding what to build, and harder, what to delete
• noticing the bug in the flow you assumed worked
• the taste to know that a screen is ugly even though it functions
• the patience to support a real user on a bad day
• the responsibility when something you shipped breaks someone's data

The real bottleneck of one

When I audited my own week, coding was never the bottleneck. The bottlenecks were deciding, verifying, and caring. AI amplifies throughput of the thing that was already cheap. It barely touches the things that were always hard.

So my honest summary: AI made the easy part instant and left the hard part hard. The people who feel like they "10x'd" were bottlenecked by typing. Most of us weren't.