I’ve been running my outsource company for the last eight years. Before that, I was a developer myself and spent years writing code every day.
When I moved more into a management role, I didn’t lose interest in technology at all. Quite the opposite. I was still following new tools, new frameworks, new ideas. I was getting better at architecture, how a product should be structured, how systems should communicate, what makes an app scalable and maintainable.
But slowly, I started losing the hands-on part.
I wasn’t writing JavaScript every day anymore. I wasn’t deeply inside custom hooks, edge cases, styling details, or exact implementation logic. I still understood how things should work, but I wasn’t fast anymore when it came to writing clean, modern code from scratch.
At the same time, I was trying to do more things myself, like creating illustrations for blog posts and social media. And honestly?
They looked terrible 😅
I was spending hours fighting with design tools, producing something mediocre, instead of focusing on things that actually scale a business. Strategy, product decisions, distribution. Worst part before that, I was paying $25–$35 per image, which also felt painful.
Then the first version of ChatGPT came out.
I was impressed immediately, but let’s be honest, back then it wasn’t that useful. It was interesting, but not that much useful for me.
#Fast forward to today, and everything changed.
Now I spend about 30 seconds generating a blog cover image. That alone saves me money and, more importantly, mental energy.
The same thing happened with video. I discovered tools like Remotion, and combined with modern AI models, creating simple SaaS videos became ridiculously easy. You won’t make a Hollywood-level animation, but you can make something that you’d normally wait days for or pay $200–$400 to outsource. And now it takes minutes.
What’s funny is that right now we see a lot of non-technical people trying to “build apps” by smashing buttons and pushing AI-generated code into public GitHub repos 😄
Most of that code is… questionable.
But for me, this is actually the best setup possible.
I don’t want to write every line of code myself anymore. I let AI handle implementation. My role is different now: I tell it how to refactor components, how to split logic, how data should flow, how the system should scale. I think in architecture, not in syntax.
At some point, I was looking for a middle-level developer for our product, Goundetected. And honestly, nobody felt good enough for what I needed. So I decided to finish the project myself.
With AI.
#We shipped it live in four weeks.
And now it’s growing month by month.
That moment changed something for me. I realized that I’m much closer to the indie hacker mindset than to the classic agency owner role. I’m tired of running an outsource company. Managing people, clients, scopes, endless discussions. My focus is shifting hard toward products.
And I also see a bigger trend.
Right now, platforms like Upwork are still full of projects like:
“I built this with AI, it’s 90% done, I just need someone to fix a few things.”
We all understand what kind of code is usually there.
But this is now.
Very soon, even that gap will shrink.
That’s why I believe outsource as we know it will slowly disappear from the SMB and startup space. What will remain is enterprise complex systems, compliance, scale, responsibility. By the end of 2026, I think there will be very few Upwork projects asking someone to “build an MVP from scratch”.
AI won’t replace good engineers.
But it will replace the need for many traditional development workflows.