A Year Into Quitting My Job to Go Indie: Making a Living on Real Skills in the AI Era — Here's What I Shipped This Week

It's been almost a year since I quit my steady job to work full-time on my own products and content. People keep asking me: aren't you anxious? With AI this good, is there even a future for indie developers?

My answer: it's precisely because AI is this good that, for the first time, one person can actually make a living on real skills. I'm not going to preach today — I'll just lay out what I actually worked on this week.

What one person + AI can ship

I'm building MakanCloud, an end-to-end SaaS for F&B businesses in Singapore — ordering, central kitchen, delivery, staff scheduling, POS, and QR ordering. I've led it from zero to launch on my own. This week was mostly about pushing the HR module and finance forward:

The employee profile form and PIN dialog are working end to end. NRIC numbers (Singapore's national ID) are masked on the server, and the audit log records only field names, never the actual values. When you're handling your customers' employee data, this is not the place to cut corners. On the finance side, I ran a production setup that created 64 accounting accounts and 19 mapping rules in one go, so each store's books actually reconcile.

A few years ago, you'd need a small team splitting the work before you'd even dare to touch this stuff. AI let me tackle all of it end to end, solo.

Real skill means fixing the stuff nobody finished

Indie dev isn't all shiny new features. This week I finally fixed a long-standing annoyance: the reconciliation cron job was throwing 80 extra error logs every run — things like "order not found" and "transaction cancelled." The root cause was that the decline codes were never mapped. It's not sexy work, but left alone it just keeps nagging at you. So I fixed it.

Another time, I noticed the website had skipped a day of auto-updates. Instead of working around it, I traced it all the way to the root cause, fixed it, and added safeguards so it won't happen again. On the security side, I also dealt with a caching issue that left old files still readable, and cleaned it up right away.

Making a living on real skill is often about exactly these unglamorous details: protect the data, fill in the potholes, and chase every problem down to its root.

Why I had the nerve to quit

Not because I'm smarter than anyone else — because the tools changed. AI isn't a gimmick; it's leverage that lets one person deliver a complete business system. I'm both the developer and the ops person, owning results end to end. Fast delivery, low cost, deep customization — that's what I stand on.

Of course, there have been failures and plenty of mistakes along the way. I'll share those honestly too — no fearmongering, no empty promises.

If you're also thinking about building something real with AI, or you need a custom system for your restaurant or small business, feel free to reach out or DM me. I'll keep writing up the real progress along the way.