If you don't have time between the jobs - how do you switch from a toxic environment to the new one without bringing the negativity and other psychological barriers with you?
I'm pretty sure that most makers don't just rely on the income from their tools, but also create some kind of financial reserve, a "cushion" in investments.
1 I'd be interested in which companies or industries you invest in?
Hello all, I am working on a networking tool. I want to know how do you find your seed users and fast-track brand growth in the early days of building a product?
We just shipped this in Basedash and my honest first reaction when we scoped the feature was no way, absolutely not. I've spent 6 years building tools that touch production data, and the whole time the rule was that humans click the buttons.
But we did it anyway, and the process of getting comfortable with it changed my mind about where the risk actually lives.
Something I wish I'd understood earlier about working with coding agents: there is no such thing as dispatching without a spec. There's only choosing who writes it.
When you send an agent a one-liner like "fix the login timeout", the unstated parts don't stay undecided. The model fills every blank with defaults from its training data the average project, the average convention, the average meaning of that sentence across every repo it has seen. Where your codebase matches the average, those fill-ins are invisible because they happen to be right. Where it doesn't, you get a diff that answers a question you never asked.
An intern who hits ambiguity tends to come ask. An agent mostly picks, and rarely flags the pick a constraint that never made it into the context might as well not exist.
So we stopped asking "spec or no spec" and started asking two questions before every dispatch. How long would a wrong guess stay invisible? And how far is this task from the average project the model trained on? Fast feedback plus mainstream shape: one line, go. Slow feedback plus weird shape: write the contract, and budget the writing as part of the build.
We made the classic mistake of building a heavy feature for five vocal customers. The extra settings completely ruined our main workflow and caused new users to drop off right after signing up.
Stripping that code out completely made the app feel fast and simple again. It was a huge reminder that adding features isn't always the answer to growing a product.
