gajo357

If what you say is reality, I would keep that.

We have a tendency to give overly optimistic estimates, best case scenario, no other tasks, no roadblocks...

Whenever asked for an estimate, think how long it would take you to make it and multiply by 5.

Manus was great, used it for months for exploring ideas, making reports and such. I dropped it when I heard that Meta was buying it.

Then I used Gemini and it was great as well, but very limited when it comes to coding (in Antigravity) because instead of giving me credits for coding in the subscription they give you GB on Google Drive. So you burn through the coding very quickly.

Github Copilot is the worst. It usually gets lost while editing some file. And it is incredibly slow.

Then I swithced to Codex and ChatGPT. Great combo for everything. Good at coding, good at exploring, generous with limits (much more so the first month).

I haven't used Claude Code directly, but Claude Opus 4.x was probably the best model for coding used via Copilot and Antigravity.

I’ve hit this exact issue with small projects, each app ends up needing its own DB. It is very hard to predict and calculate the usage in the provider's CU (I mainly used Azure and AWS).

I tried a few approaches: sharing one DB with schemas (gets messy over time), spinning things up/down (breaks things unpredictably), just paying and forgetting about it (feels wasteful).

Still haven’t found a setup that feels right for multiple small apps.

Did you come up with something?

Similar situation here. If you find any good answers, please make a list for the rest of us :)

Sounds very interesting. Have you ever considered hiring outside of US. I'd love to apply for the C#/F# based roles, but can only work as a remote consultant (B2B). Ping me if that is a possibility. I have been working in .NET for 15 years professionally and 5 years fully remote.

Nice work. I had this issue as well, several times.

Making a small project, needed a DB for quick proof oc concept.

"Proper" DBs are too expensive, free ones are bound with some random compute-unit mathematics. Everything self hosted takes time that I'd rather spend coding.

My life strategy is second-guessing :P

But at the same time as you, after working for 5 years, I started learning like crazy. Diving deeper in the .NET framework, learning functional programming, making home-brew projects that do web scraping, data analysis, even some web development. Then Docker and Kubernetes... 100s of online courses, books, without clear intention or objective progress. But it did not frustrate me at that time as I was having fun.

Only after 2-3 years of doing this I noticed that I know some things, that when I go to a job interview I know more than the person interviewing me (not always). The knowledge compounds.

If you have a deliberate goal go for it. But if you just go for things that peak your interest that seems to work as well. It did for me.

There is no way to protect your idea from being copied/stolen.

It happened a million times over, you have some brilliant idea, people start using it, and after a few months some big company puts 10-100 engineers on it and they do the same thing.

I would say that the key is to get to a big enough audience so they would rather buy you out than compete. Easier said than done :P

And the biggest question is: do you want to commit 100% of your time and money to building your company, or you would rather spend your time building new things?