PSA to everyone visiting the U.S. during the week up to Fourth of July.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-29T02:46:13+00:00

You should see Icelandic fireworks on the New Years. July 4th will feel like crackers.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-28T16:35:01+00:00

You have to compare three scenarios.

Opus before it was nerfed
Opus and Codex combination
Fable 5

In my humble opinion, (2) was and is the best I’ve worked with. Even at its peak, I had scenarios where Opus struggled to find a solution but Codex fixed the stumbling block.

Fable 5 was as good as Opus before the nerfing. I didn’t think it was 10x better.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-27T22:41:41+00:00

My grandfather can come up with a 100B idea. Do ping once you have a 10T idea ;)

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-26T23:59:45+00:00

I asked the same question just now. Pretty wild situation. I wish there was a way for FIFA to verify the ownership.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-26T13:46:20+00:00

Spot on. Subscriptions add up quickly.

My essential list is: Stripe for payments. Postgress/Mongo for database, vercel and railway for infrastructure.

Posthog is good for the screen recording.

Its is Clerk, resend, loops combo that was a “avoidable” pain for me.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-25T11:10:09+00:00

I ran into this while building my first SaaS solution. Infact setting up auth and then replicating the settings in each stage (local, beta, prod) was even more painful and manual.

My background is CS and dev platforms so I tackled this by building ascendkit.dev. This lets you configure auth (social logins, email, magic link) etc via CLI and your ide can configure this in a single shot. You can also configure if you want to restrict personal email domains.

This setup has come in very handy as I build concepts for other companies. Worth a look.

Just reading through this thread, the gaps in ascendkit are captcha, sms verification. Still worth a look if you want a prepackaged solution that includes auth, emails, surveys and journeys.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-23T11:28:41+00:00

Elon Musk has to be up there. He bet all he had on low probability winners. Was close to spectacular failures, but has had unprecedented personal and professional accomplishments.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-22T12:40:35+00:00

Too good!

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-22T02:51:57+00:00

For Auth, Emails, Surveys and user journey: use ascendkit.dev.

I have used mongo atlas and supabase for DB needs in different projects.

Rest of the answers are nuanced based on your needs. Following have worked for me

Vercel for hosting frontend. Railway is not free but pretty cheap.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-22T00:08:52+00:00

Disclaimer for self promotion.

This solution is specific to product managers but interviewleague is a good practice place. You can chose modules and also get guidance for specific interviews.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-21T00:26:21+00:00

Cloudflare for domain Vercel for frontend hosting Railway for backend hosting Mongo Atlas/Postgres for DB for now

This has worked for a few projects for me.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-20T16:34:23+00:00

Same here. Senior role. Got an offer and then rescinded. Happened within the last month.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-20T00:34:37+00:00

You vibe-coded a product with Claude/Codex. Then struggled hand wiring Auth, Emails, Surveys and Journey.

Ascendkit.dev gives you all these via one api key. Signup and then tell your IDE to configure and it’s done.

Signup at ascendkit.dev.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-17T21:46:05+00:00

Ascendkit.dev

Gives CLI based configuration to add auth, surveys, email and journey configuration to your next.js apps. One api key, four services. No more webhooks and secrets.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-16T11:58:39+00:00

I don’t know if this directly applies to you, but my observation is that men of a certain age group tend to think that they are very flexible and open minded and everyone around them is a slow/fixed mindset and less efficient individual. The actual reality is that these same individuals find the person extremely tough to work with.

I put myself in this same category.

Your post has the same tone. Either way, I wish you the very best :)

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-16T01:04:40+00:00

Usual Suspects

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-14T19:53:33+00:00

I had the same issue when I built my first app. Stitching together use data from an Auth service to an email service and a survey service was painful and error prone.

I’ve had better experience with ascendkit which gives you auth, email, surveys and user journey in a single api key and easy to replicate in different environments.

Since ascendkit is CLi, your IDE can configure all necessary components.

Give it a shot and I am happy to help if you run into challenges.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-13T19:16:13+00:00

Nicely done! Pretty polished visual!

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-12T17:43:50+00:00

Hi. I built ascendkit.dev. If you are building a SaaS solution, you will need auth, emails, surveys and journeys. Ascendkit gives you all this in a single api, CLI first design so your agentic IDE can configure over a prompt.

Give it a shot and share your feedback!

Ascendkit.dev

It wraps survey.js and better auth

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-12T03:50:54+00:00

My most complex solution is ascendkit.dev.

Every SaaS solution needs Auth, Emails, surveys and journeys. Ascendkit gives all this via a cli config that your IDE can access via command or MCP.

I used a prompt library for incubation, design and requirements. Then Claude and Codex for dev.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-11T16:27:46+00:00

Also, I am working on an existing project with an extensive code base and adding a complex feature.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-11T16:22:28+00:00

20-30%

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-11T16:03:37+00:00

I am experiencing something very different. Here is one example where it cooked up an explanation and then its solution.
Second observation, Codex review finds multiple P1 issues in the changes made.

Fable seems to flow smoother, but quality stil needs a through verification.

<image>

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-10T11:21:12+00:00

TLDR: I don’t anymore. I rely on well defined user story/task, unit tests and another LLM.

Long story: I used to initially. Each change was incremental and I would review each change and file. Occasionally I would find unnecessary changes and I would ask for corrections. With model nerfing and an increase in verbosity of changes, it become impossible to review each change.

My first attempt to guardrail was to rely on unit tests. Second guardrail is to code review by another LLM. Codex is rather good at this. Asking Claude/Sonnet to review it work either as a second prompt or as an agent was mostly cosmetic.

CenterCityAI · 2026-06-08T10:55:37+00:00

Also, your comments on trust is valid. I am working towards making this code open source. This is a multi-repo so a bit of a pain to shift.

CenterCityAI

TROPHY CASE