The dream of building a profitable indie SaaS business is officially dead, according to a scathing critique of the current AI-driven development landscape. What once seemed achievable—launching a side project that could generate $19.99 per month from a couple hundred customers—has been obliterated by the AI gold rush. The author compares this futile effort to the Swedish proverb "elda för kråkorna" (building a fire for the crows), where developers pour countless hours into projects that ultimately benefit only the AI companies selling the tools.

This isn't just about competition—it's about a fundamental shift in what matters. Technical excellence, once the hallmark of successful software, has become irrelevant. Quality metrics like TTFP and INP mean nothing when users have been conditioned to accept broken experiences, tombstone spinners, and purchase flows that simply don't work. The web itself has been systematically dismantled: React consumed the ecosystem, Safari crippled it, Google stopped linking to it, and a handful of US corporations now control who can succeed online. The author argues that independence is no longer viable—the future belongs to those who can secure high-touch enterprise sales and attach themselves to the select few companies still allowed to profit on the internet.

The irony is that even the AI evangelists promoting this revolution aren't safe. While they imagine themselves commanding unstoppable bot armies that will build software empires, the reality is that nobody will find their products, nobody will pay for them, and all those tokens will have been burned for someone else's gain—a bonfire offering to the datacenter and GPU crows circling overhead.