Paul
Here's a thought experiment worth sitting with for a minute. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and every AI coding tool is gone. Not down for maintenance, not rate limited, not expensive, just gone. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, all of the LLM-powered tools that a huge number of solo founders now depend on, simply don't exist anymore, and there's no indication they're coming back. What would you actually do?
I want to be clear up front that I don't think this is going to happen, and this post is not a prediction or a warning that the tools are about to vanish. The major AI companies are well funded, the technology works, and the trajectory is toward these tools becoming more capable and more entrenched rather than disappearing. But the thought experiment is still worth doing, because the honest answer you give to it reveals something important about how you've structured your work as a builder, and the things it reveals are worth knowing whether or not the scenario ever actually happens.
Why the question is uncomfortable
For a lot of people building with AI coding tools right now, the honest answer to "what would you do" is somewhere between "I'm not sure" and "I'd be in serious trouble," and the discomfort of that answer is the point of the exercise. A whole category of solo founder has emerged in the last two years whose entire build capability is mediated through an LLM, where they can produce working software by describing what they want but could not produce the same software by sitting down and writing it themselves. If the tools disappeared, that capability would disappear with them, and the platforms those founders run would become things they own but can no longer meaningfully modify.
That's an uncomfortable position to be in, and the discomfort is worth feeling honestly rather than waving away. It doesn't mean those founders did anything wrong, because building with the best available tools is a reasonable thing to do, and refusing to use AI coding tools out of some principle of self-reliance would just mean shipping less and slower for no real benefit. But it does mean that a particular kind of dependency has quietly formed, and most of the people who have that dependency haven't actually thought about it directly, because the tools have been reliable enough that the question never forced itself.
The reason the question is worth asking even though the scenario is unlikely is that the same dependency which would be catastrophic in the disappearance scenario is also the thing that creates smaller, more realistic problems all the time. The tools don't have to disappear forever to hurt you. They just have to be down for a day, or get much more expensive, or change in ways that break your workflow, and a builder who has thought honestly about the total-disappearance version of the question is much better prepared for the realistic partial versions that actually do happen.
The three honest answers
When I think about how different builders would actually answer this question, they fall into roughly three groups, and which group someone is in says a lot about how exposed they are.
The first group would be genuinely fine, because they had real software skills before the AI tools existed and the tools just made them faster. If the tools disappeared, this group would go back to building the way they used to build, slower and more painfully but still entirely capable of shipping and maintaining real software. The AI tools were an accelerant for this group rather than a foundation, and removing the accelerant slows them down without stopping them. This group tends to be developers who adopted AI tools as professionals rather than people who entered building through the AI tools.
The second group would be in real trouble in the short term but could recover, because while they don't currently have the skills to build without AI assistance, they have enough surrounding knowledge that they could develop those skills if they had to. This group understands their stack at a conceptual level, can read code even if they can't fluently write it, and has enough operational competence to keep their existing platforms running while they climb the learning curve. The disappearance would be a serious setback for this group, costing them months of productivity, but it wouldn't be the end of their ability to build.
The third group would be effectively done as builders, at least for a long time, because their entire capability was the tool and without it they have neither the skills to build nor the surrounding knowledge to develop those skills quickly. This group can describe software but cannot evaluate it, can deploy a platform but cannot debug it when it breaks, and treated the AI tool as a complete substitute for technical knowledge rather than as an amplifier of it. For this group the disappearance scenario isn't a setback, it's a wall, and the platforms they built would slowly degrade because nobody, including the founder, could maintain them.
The useful thing about this framework isn't predicting which group you'd be in during an actual disappearance, since that scenario is unlikely. The useful thing is that the same three groups exist with respect to every smaller disruption, where the first group shrugs off an outage, the second group loses a frustrating day, and the third group is genuinely stuck until the tool comes back. Knowing which group you're in tells you how exposed you are to the realistic versions of this problem that happen all the time.
What the answer tells you to do
If your honest answer to the thought experiment puts you in the first group, the main thing to do is nothing, because you've already structured your work in a way that's resilient to tool disruption, and you can keep using AI coding tools aggressively knowing that they're an amplifier rather than a crutch. The only thing worth watching is whether your skills atrophy over time from disuse, where a developer who relies entirely on AI tools for years might find that their unaided ability has quietly degraded, and an occasional deliberate practice of building something without assistance keeps that from happening.
If your honest answer puts you in the second group, the thing to do is treat the gap between you and the first group as a project, where you deliberately develop the skills that would let you build without assistance even though you currently don't need to. This doesn't mean abandoning AI tools, because that would be foolish, but it means using them in a way that builds your understanding rather than substituting for it, where you read and understand the code the tool generates, you take on some work manually to keep the skills sharp, and you treat the surrounding knowledge of your stack as something worth investing in directly. The second group can move toward the first group with deliberate effort, and the disappearance thought experiment is the motivation to actually do it.
If your honest answer puts you in the third group, the thing to do is take that seriously as a real risk to address rather than a hypothetical to ignore, because the third group is exposed not just to the unlikely disappearance scenario but to every pricing change, every outage, and every workflow-breaking update that the tools will inevitably go through. The path out of the third group is the slow unglamorous work of actually learning the fundamentals, where you develop enough understanding of code, infrastructure, and your own stack that the AI tool becomes something you use from a position of competence rather than total dependence. That work is genuinely worth doing, and the thought experiment is a way of making the abstract risk concrete enough to motivate it.
The version of this that actually matters
The total disappearance scenario is a useful thought experiment precisely because it's extreme, where pushing the hypothetical all the way to the limit makes the dependency impossible to ignore. But the version of this that actually matters in practice is much milder and much more certain to happen. The tools will have outages. The pricing will change, almost certainly upward, as the current period of below-cost pricing gives way to whatever the real economics turn out to be. The tools will change in ways that break workflows people had come to rely on. And the question of how exposed you are to those realistic disruptions has the same answer as the question of how you'd handle the disappearance, just at a smaller scale.
The builders who are going to do well over the next decade are not the ones who avoided AI coding tools, because avoiding the tools means shipping less and slower for no real benefit, and the tools are genuinely transformative for what a solo founder can accomplish. The builders who do well are going to be the ones who used the tools aggressively while also maintaining enough underlying competence that they're not helpless when the tools have a bad day. That's a both-and rather than an either-or, where you get the full productivity benefit of building with AI and also the resilience of not being completely dependent on it.
So the thought experiment isn't really about a future where the tools disappear, because that future is unlikely. It's about the present, and about whether you've structured your building in a way that would survive the smaller and more realistic shocks. If the honest answer to "what would you do if the tools disappeared" makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is useful information, and the right response is not to panic and not to dismiss it but to spend some of your time building the underlying competence that would turn a catastrophic answer into a merely inconvenient one. The tools are probably not going anywhere. Your ability to function without them is still worth having.
