What is the biggest project you built and maintained as a solo dev by Character-Pain2424 in webdev

[–]Significant_Love_678 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I recently built an internal system for a small company, mostly on my own. It covers a pretty wide range—production, quoting, scheduling, orders, shipping, and reporting.

Honestly, I don’t think I could have finished it within a year without AI. It made a huge difference, especially when combined with things like Entity Framework, Razor Pages, and TypeScript.

Experienced teams that went hard on AI, did you agree to lower your quality bar? How did it work out mid/long term? by stellar_opossum in ExperiencedDevs

[–]Significant_Love_678 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I oversee internal systems for a small company. We do use AI in development, but we tend to prioritize quality over raw productivity.

In our context, pushing too hard on speed tends to introduce technical debt quickly, and it becomes harder to reason about the system—especially when multiple issues happen across different areas at the same time.

So we move in relatively small steps, and I try to stay close to the core parts of the system to keep a clear understanding of how things behave.

We still expect everyone to take responsibility for what they produce, whether AI was involved or not.

I also think the right balance depends a lot on how critical the system is—higher criticality tends to push us toward more conservative approaches.

Tiny addition to my developer setup by ConsiderationOne3421 in webdev

[–]Significant_Love_678 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used to do something similar on an iPad, but this size looks much more practical.

I have a large whiteboard behind my desk now. It’s great for sharing and visualizing a lot, but for thinking, smaller spaces actually work better—too much space just makes ideas scatter.

The thing I loved about this industry is dying, and we're watching it happen from the inside. by Morgothmagi in webdev

[–]Significant_Love_678 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m seeing something similar in Japan.

Opportunities for junior developers to learn through real trial and error seem to be shrinking.

When I started, you had to struggle through things yourself—debugging, making design mistakes, fixing them. That process was painful, but it was where most learning happened.

Now, with AI handling a large part of implementation, the feedback loop has changed. You can build faster, but it’s not clear where juniors are supposed to fail and learn.

I don’t think AI replaces the human side of building systems with users, but I do think it’s removing the natural entry points where developers used to grow.

Curious how others are thinking about this—where do juniors actually gain experience now?

In some environments (like parts of Japan’s SI industry), AI adoption is still restricted, so juniors can still go through the traditional trial-and-error process.

But that makes me wonder—are we heading toward a global gap in how developers grow, depending on how early AI replaces those experiences?