Approaching another turning point: The Rise of IndieCorp

Introduction

In recent conversations with colleagues about workplace dynamics, a concerning trend has emerged: companies increasingly view employees—especially software engineers—as disposable. The catalyst? Artificial Intelligence.

Business leaders, witnessing the development efficiency promised by new AI products, are quick to embrace these technologies for their speed, cost-effectiveness, and perceived replaceability—often overlooking the hidden costs and complexities.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. When ChatGPT first appeared in 2020, many of us anticipated this trajectory. What's remarkable is how quickly—within just five years—this shift has materialized into workplace reality.

We've witnessed this narrative before.

The rise of creator economy platforms like YouTube exemplifies this pattern. These platforms enabled creators to build audiences and monetize content without the traditional gatekeepers of television networks and their associated costs. This "disintermediation" force is now reshaping the software industry.

The Future of Software Engineering

Software engineers face a critical choice: either continue "hand-coding" and push their technical skills to the absolute limit to compete with AI capabilities, or evolve into "prompting whisperers"—operating at a higher level of abstraction to translate requirements into AI-comprehensible instructions.

The future developer role will likely resemble playing a complex strategy game: planning workflows, designing architectures, decomposing requirements, and orchestrating AI agents to execute the implementation.

What About UX Design?

User Experience design has traditionally served as the critical interface between complex functionality and user-friendly interactions. However, AI systems now have access to user behavior data that far exceeds traditional user surveys and research methods. Unlike software engineers, UX designers may find their responsibilities increasingly absorbed by Product Managers—who can now generate wireframes and hand them directly to developers, potentially bypassing the traditional UX role entirely.

The True Value Proposition

Following this trajectory, the most valuable capability in the future won't be technical proficiency in programming or sophisticated interface design, but rather ideation and vision—conceiving what should be built.

What products do you want to create? What problems do you want to solve? With clear direction, AI can handle the execution details.

In this paradigm, even expensive language model subscriptions become economically viable for entrepreneurship—as long as the total operational cost remains below traditional minimum wage employment, the value proposition is compelling.

This makes the proliferation of individual corporations (which I'll term "IndieCorp") not a matter of if, but when.

A Personal Case Study

Consider my own experience: I used to maintain long lists of side project ideas that never materialized because of "lack of time". Today, with proper logical structuring and architectural guidance, I can often develop functional prototypes within a single day.

Many things that once felt "impossible" now feel "effortless". I've developed specialized AI agents for different aspects of development, allowing me to focus on the "what" rather than the "how".

Conclusion

We previously witnessed creator platforms disrupt traditional media; now we stand at another inflection point as IndieCorp challenges conventional corporate structures.

Instead of fearing "job displacement", we might reframe it as "opportunity liberation". AI has compressed "the work of ten people" into "the output of one". You no longer need to recruit specialized talent across multiple domains or bear significant personnel costs—corresponding AI models and automation platforms like n8n and Make can serve as your personalized digital workforce.

This leaves us with one fundamental question:

What will be your IndieCorp?

for zhTw version: 迎來另一個轉捩點：IndieCorp