2026 indiehacker playbook: > complain on X about how [entrenched SaaS product] is so expensive now > people like and agree > idea validated! > build 83% cheaper competitor To be fair, this is a pretty decent playbook.

"What SaaS are you building?" "woah you're getting ahead of yourself. first my agentic cloud swarm is building internal clones of all the SaaS products we need for the main SaaS product to function. Currently they are building clones of heroku, beehiv, intercom and stripe"

People who are running "agent swarms in the cloud" while they sleep, what's the use case? Even if I had a backlog of 100 issues I'm pretty sure a single Claude instance could rip through that in 30 mins let alone multiple, all night. Curious to know what people use this for.

I built an AI slop machine over the weekend. I will never launch it, after seeing what I created. You put in a story prompt, and it generates a more structured story with stakes, cliffhangers, a beginning, middle, end. Splits it into episodes. Storyboards the whole thing, makes a cast, music, poster, voiceovers. Then generates the visuals (different styles available from anime to cinematic) and you can play the episode as a slideshow, or render it as a video. Uses all the latest models that you would expect. A few observations from this exercise: 1) it was trivial to build There's no moat here. This is just "AI glue", building an app that wraps several AI models. The moat is the GTM strategy, which leads me to... 2) this space is insanely competitive there's tons of AI movie makers all using the same models with some thin layer of prompt direction or UX as the differentiation. totally saturated. 3) AI video courses I noticed that some of the biggest advertisers in this space are people selling "how to create your own AI movie" courses. There's something off about this, almost dropshippy. It suggests that there's more value in hyping the thing and selling courses about the thing, than there is in the thing. 4) this shit is really expensive All of those cool AI videos that you see using the latest video models, are expensive to make. A 60 second "mini episode" of a story built using my platform would cost $5 in raw inference. There's no business here, whatever margin you put on top of that can just get eaten by a competitor. And imagine if a user buys $100 of credits (of which $90 is passed through to your AI provider) then decides they hate the movie that was created, and asks for a refund or charges back. Enough of those in a month will bankrupt you. 5) just didn't feel right It's a fun little demo that got some laughs from my friends but ultimately it's contributing to the never ending pile of AI slop. Is that something I want to be part of? Not really.

I think the future of indiehacking is barbell shaped. On the right, build AI things for AI people. It will get cloned to shit. Some will work, many will not. Fastest execution plus distribution wins. Be prepared to make tons of money one month and nothing the next. On the left, build boring things that nobody wants to clone, that will take years to gain enough market share. Slow burn. CRM for Chihuahua owners. Newsletter tool for bakeries. Hyper niche. Everything in the middle is a dead zone now.

Bloom 🌺 > Doom 🌋 Sometimes I catch myself thinking that AI is destroying the software industry. But what I should be thinking about is, AI enables me to make something 100x bigger than what I could do before. This is a once in a lifetime turning point.

At some point Claude switched from doing things deterministically (e.g. knowing the position of an element based on its css) to wanting to eyeball everything (take screenshot, make some judgment). I disabled claude-in-chrome but it's still finding a headless browser to use.

Definitely living in a simulation. I was thinking of a name for a new project last night. Settled on one I like, and then slept on it. Today I find a Bannerbear competitor with a similar name. Never seen it before. Weird.

I never hit any usage limits ever before, until I started using claude-in-chrome. Turning it off. It seems way too eager to fire up a browser even for the most mundane things - bro I don't need you to browse to localhost and screenshot the fix, I have the tab open right here.

Spent the morning replacing a SaaS vendor. Infra-related. They had raised $2 million, one of the smaller YC companies from back in the day. It wasn't even about saving money, it's just "neater" to control more of the stack, if it's easy to migrate. Don't build for devs!

At least once a week on X, I go down a rabbit hole exploring a new space because someone here is talking about massive growth in the space, only to find they sell a shovel for that space. I feel like build in public circa 2020 was more genuine.

Thinking about building a “hedge” SaaS against AI. I’ll continue building in the AI space but at the same time build a super boring app that has nothing to do with AI, has non-tech users, as a hedge against AI eating everything at the cutting edge.

Nee to hear some SaaS 2026 success stories to start my Monday off right! Who is winning? Currently I can think of: Postiz - just hit $200k MRR Squad - hit $10k MRR less than a month after launch Anyone else?

Day in the life of tech founder in 2026 - new company launches a groundbreaking new paradigm - breakfast - discover 17 new competitors - vibe code feature - existential dread - lunch - another new paradigm has replaced the one from this morning - OpenAI now direct competitor