My experience has been quite the opposite. Like OP, I am a middle aged developer. I have decades of experience in the industry and with open source/side projects. I think there is so much good new software being developed by single developers (https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/). When there is one person its an itch to scratch, not a business plan.

I do think the type of projects have indeed changed however, so maybe OP is looking in the wrong place, or has become steeped in the corporate world (see Middle Aged).

Look at app stores, f-droid, vscode plugins, github repos, frontend frameworks, distributed databases, Linux desktops, TUI apps, text editors. There are more projects than ever. They may not be as low level or as widely used as system kernels or programming languages, but there is so much code being written for personal needs.

I actually think the fact that these are not widely used is important. Higher level constructs and AI have made programming much more accessible. Non-devs are making one off apps just for their family. Or using LLMs to quickly churn out scripts to automate home assistant or common desktop tasks.

I personally have built several projects from my long-running ideas list that I never would have had time to do before without the help of AI. Savr is one (https://github.com/jonocodes/savr). For someone like me who has built that same CRUD interface for every company, AI has been an amazing motivator to work on new interesting things and less repetitive drudgery.

Reads like a personal experience applied to a giant group of people. Hacker culture was never more alive...

From tinkerers to metric seekers: How the shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity.

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