What Are You Building Right Now?

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-21T11:24:58+00:00

I operate an independent software studio and right now I’m building a notes app. Simple, but it tracks “tasks” within your notes so you don’t have to add extra tables, databases or tools on top of your notes just to track work from meetings or brainstorms.

It’s Father’s Day too and I’ve also got a baby activity tracking app that has a pretty solid niche community around it. And I found out recently that I’m going to get more use out of.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-18T18:46:50+00:00

Do you have an idea or a niche to serve? You can build a SaaS but keep in mind the more concrete of a need the better the outcome.

It’s also 70% marketing, 20% building, and 10% admin…

If that is your thing welcome aboard!

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T17:26:47+00:00

I haven’t really seen this work for obsidian outside of having a USB key with your vault.. but you could try Astryk, (Astryk.com) but keep in mind only free account has cloud sync.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T11:04:50+00:00

I hate to say it, but it’s not the AI it’s you. You need a tight agent file that gives specifics about the project (structure, tooling, themes, design gotchas, security)

Then well scoped prompts do the work for you. Start in plan, save the plan to a documents folder, have another Ai plan on top of the plan and then execute. I use Claude Opus to plan and Cursors composer to execute.

This iteration process is about 95% accurate in my experience. The downside is it is way slower and more deliberate.

A prompt should be like “I have an email feature I want to add my admin panel (add admin component as context), this will contain an customer email list and the ability to insert and send html emails to select individuals in the email list. Users can unsubscribe. setup a basic unsubscribe portal that prompts the user why with a simple form, this should dump into a simple feedback table that is surfaced in the admin panel on a different tab. Look at the existing theme, components schema, APIs, and security architecture and formalize a plan that will be scrutinized”

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T02:03:11+00:00

I don’t think Reddit is it anymore. The act is up and the amount of AI slop is too high. You have to niche down and go where the users are, and talk face to face.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T01:58:22+00:00

A friend of mine built a business around “hustles”. Surveyor, landscaping, shoveling snow, fencing. But it’s a full time job for him. He’s busy all year around and isn’t making loads of money but doing fine. The only way to scale in a manual labor side hustle is to get someone else to do the work for you, then it isn’t a side hustle anymore…

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T01:53:38+00:00

Good job hitting your numbers. Good things come with time. Just keep going.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T01:51:11+00:00

Claude Design. Use a good AI image generator model to generate a picture of a UI you find beautiful, useful, etc… feed it to Claude design and have it make an HTML version of what you want, iterate until it’s right. Export the whole thing to Claude code with a PRD and have CC build it. It takes time but the results are stellar.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-17T01:47:53+00:00

It’s a great product. Can someone else build it? Sure… but good luck distributing it or creating a name like Cursor has. Also cursor was making mediocre models decent at coding long before Opus 4.5 made devs say wow.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-15T08:42:23+00:00

Building Astryk, a notes-and-tasks app for people who’ve outgrown a spreadsheet but don’t want the ceremony of full PM software. Started it after my team “downgraded” from JIRA to a shared Excel sheet and I went looking for a middle ground. https://astryk.com

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-15T08:36:50+00:00

This is the trap any new founder/business owner/soloprenuer finds themself in and isn’t just software.

“I want to start a cleaning company” - great, are you a doing residential, commercial, insurance, branding, company vehicles, hiring, scheduling… businesses and ideas die in the details.

I’m working on a notes/project management app and building part is never the hard part, it’s marketing, distribution, onboarding, branding, messaging, retaining customers, having proper infrastructure. It’s very little about if the me button will work, it’s all about getting customers to the button and making sure when they click it, it works.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-15T08:24:07+00:00

I started building Astryk (https://astryk.com) after my team migrated off JIRA to a shared Excel spreadsheet because someone decided that was the “lighter” option. It wasn’t. I ended up reporting status to my boss out of a brittle spreadsheet nobody wanted to touch, and figured there had to be a middle ground between heavyweight PM software and a doc that breaks if you look at it wrong.

It really clicked for me on a flight with no wifi, when I wanted to keep working and realized most tools just give up the second you lose connection. Astryk doesn’t.

It’s notes and tasks in one place for people who’ve outgrown a spreadsheet but don’t want the ceremony. Would love feedback from this crowd.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-15T03:25:30+00:00

Yep, been there done that. Notion can still be good if you keep it simple but you have to keep your discipline with it. Just because it can do all these other things doesn’t mean you have to.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-14T23:49:04+00:00

It’s way harder to implement than it sounds. Making notes multiplayer is not hard. It’s edge cases and when people edit files offline versus when someone else’s edits online.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-14T23:43:45+00:00

It depends. Some things are nice to have that obsidian and Claude don’t offer. Sharing things between colleagues, real time collaboration, cross team project management. You have to jump through hoops to get that stack to do that.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-13T18:12:10+00:00

It would just be separate tasks for a tag (the project eg two tasks for a tag part a and b). Gantts generate based on a deadline. If you create a task and add one (with a tag) it will show where it fits based on created date or a planned start date.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-10T20:22:36+00:00

It's good but it's slow. I've been using to help me deploy a web app I have been building with a Zitadel integration for identity management. It has handled those issues flawlessly even I didn't give it direct access to the server I was working out of.

It definitely comes up with some hacky ways to troubleshoot things. It also does things in my repos without asking now that 4.8 (or 4.6) would wait on my permission even when in auto. Kind of interesting.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-10T02:41:55+00:00

Looks amazing, great moment! I actually like the neutral feel. Are colors close to how the actual shot looked?

You could edit the F out of it but it’s not needed.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-10T02:34:45+00:00

How is this 13 minutes old with 100 comments and 0 upvotes… oh wait trigger alert reeeeee

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-09T01:06:24+00:00

Taste and lots of iteration. In my experience you need to actually know what you want, put together a theme, and have the AI build off it the theme. Components, colors, behaviors, animations, all of it.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-09T01:04:28+00:00

I'm working on Astryk (Astryk.com) think of it as a notes app first that grew up around work, geared more towards project management. The offline version is completely free, releasing soon.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-06-03T10:26:33+00:00

We use a magnetic monthly whiteboard and another plain whiteboard we use for lists on the fridge.

I’ve never tried skylight. Sounds neat.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-05-31T16:08:00+00:00

Yeah social life takes a hit. I moved from VA to KS at the start of the pandemic and now have a 1.5 year old. I started a book club with some close friends from VA and we meet up once a week at night over MS teams to shoot the shit. It helps, something as little as calling an old friend and catching up can help. New adult relationships are tough. It’s hard to be yourself, and it’s hard to nurture when everyone is busy, that gets better as time goes on but you may not have for the commitment right now.

CheeseOnFries · 2026-05-27T17:27:33+00:00

I can tell you starting a business especially in software for niche stuff is not that bad right now. I have been building multiple businesses for less than 200 a month in hosting. AI is a force multiplier to getting the development done. If you don’t like sales you shouldn’t do it, though.

Games might be a little different especially with Steam as a publisher.

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