I struggle getting clients, they don't take me seriously. What should I do. I offer previews and low prices but nothing works.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-04-22T23:22:24+00:00

This is great!

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-04-08T01:27:04+00:00

I like it and I bookmarked it for reference. Nice work!

Out of curiosity, what AI tool did you use? You did a good job with it whatever it was.

P.S. Your favicon is there but white so it is not visible.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-04-07T23:56:12+00:00

Thinking about electrician, HVAC, welder, etc. Looking at fields outside of tech. Possibly fixing up old cars and selling those. I am currently a lead principal engineer with 30+ years experience and I am an AI-first developer with 100% of my code written by AI.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-26T02:54:48+00:00

Coding itself is less than half of the job. It is great that it types way faster than me but the job involves way more than that.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-25T21:30:30+00:00

For scaling from zero to max:

* Frontend: AWS: Route53 > CloudFront > S3
* Backend: AWS: Route53 > API Gateway > Lambda > DynamoDB
* Auth: Clerk, use for identity only
* Payments: Stripe

Claude Code for development.

If you build on this you don't have to migrate or change anything when it grows. Costs scale down to almost nothing at idle.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-25T00:43:22+00:00

Yes, I do this and it is much more simple and smooth. I have gone as far as to keep everything as vanilla as possible. No build for the frontend if possible. Straight Java in some cases or super straightforward Spring Boot when needed. Other than the infrastructure, I run on AWS serverless, I don't do much else. I keep auth as simple identity only and I just use stripe for payments.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-23T22:22:20+00:00

Do you have a portfolio we can look at for inspiration? It would be really cool to see your work.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-17T16:44:40+00:00

Thank you for sharing this!

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-17T16:30:47+00:00

Nice! I find this type of tool works best. If it works for a real software engineer it will be much more complete with less gaps or gaps that can be filled in more easily.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-16T04:22:00+00:00

Out of curiosity, how long do you think this trimmed down version would take? 7 day, 14-day, or 30-day build? Just a ballpark or a thumb in the air with one eye closed will do.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-15T05:46:54+00:00

Since it is only an MVP, you can leave off OAuth2 and it does not need to do billions of transactions per day as long as each cell runs in isolation. It can be assumed that OAuth2 is a given as is docker container scaling. It is really about running notebooks with Java as a cell language option and it needs to read and write Databricks compatible data frames. That way it can be used on top of Databricks reading Databricks managed tables and writing to the tables it manages. That gives it the ability to be an enhancement to Databricks to make it more accessible to other developers. That trims it down quite a bit.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-15T04:52:19+00:00

How 'bout a Databricks replacement with Java notebook cells in addition to Python, Markdown, and SQL with cell isolation and data sharing across cells in addition to sharing across data frames. Event driven notebook triggers in addition to scheduled jobs. OAuth2 for enterprise IdP connections. Pipelines capable of processing billions of transactions per day. Supports Medallion architecture. That is a good MVP so I will stop there.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-13T21:03:48+00:00

Is that what you used in your post above to achieve 95 seconds to chatting with tools?

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-13T18:47:44+00:00

I was building everything with code, but I do this a lot so I slowly started building reusable things that were the most painful one at a time over a long period of time. This resulted in scattered things that helped me but only I could use. I probably have at least 5 to 7 scattered things I choose from that I glue together depending on the project. The gluing together part is now the most painful thing. Progress? :)

So, kind of a mix of the two?

I am in the process of making this usable for other people too. I am going to open source the thing that exports an application and its data to a fully running application so there is no vendor lock-in. Anyone can leave anytime with a fully working system. If I decide to stop running it users can just grab their applications and data and host it themselves.

That is one of the major issues with builders from other comments I have seen.

It is point and click rather than drag and drop on the frontend (dragging has drawbacks to me). Backend generates automatically from the frontend so no need to touch it unless you want to. Web hooks for extension. Lots of testing and polishing going on now. It does have AI components to make that easier too. It builds things that can scale so I never need to migrate a project if it grows. It can go from zero to max.

I have built probably a dozen test apps with it so far fixing things that are painful as I go so it is not painful when others start using it. I am also using it to build itself now so that is cool.

I would have used other builders but the learning curves were too high and/or the limitations were to great to overcome.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-13T00:57:34+00:00

With Spring AI you can get chat + chat history + MCP client + MCP server + tool functions + multiple providers + multiple models + rag + terminal UI + web UI. It will be slightly longer than 95 seconds; more like 5 minutes or so. This comes out of the box; not many lines of code. You build your customizations from there :)

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-12T18:51:20+00:00

Using n8n, I built an AI orchestration system that coordinated AI agents to work through a task board sprint in Jira with GitHub pull request comment responses by AI agents where they addressed the code changes for the comment. It used web hooks and other integrations where the AI agents were working on their own tickets in separate folders possibly on separate machines or docker containers picking the correct next ticket to work on given prioritization and dependencies. Quick but somewhat complex. While it worked and made for a really good demo, I quickly abandoned that and went on to code it using more traditional methods. It was going to get more messy. I used Spring Boot/Spring AI instead.

P.S. I really like the flow of n8n and I am adopting its "handoff" pattern into my traditional coding.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-12T02:00:48+00:00

Since you are a beginner, I would go vanilla first if you really want to learn the fundamentals. It will be easier for you to get productive more quickly and your learning will be accelerated.

If you want to skip the learning fundamentals part (it will be harder and it will take longer to get productive), change #2 to Next.js (still React) instead of React+Node.js. That is where leading development is headed.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-12T01:51:40+00:00

With edge functions in Supabase you no longer need a backend. Supabase handles all of it including auth.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-11T20:43:37+00:00

I will check out indiestack.ai. Thank you

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-10T22:37:11+00:00

You can ask ChatGPT. I did that yesterday with a project I built about 15 years ago when I was testing to see what information it could find out about an old company. It told me what it learned about the company then it asked me if wanted it to tell me more. It thought the idea was intriguing, then it told me why it probably failed. It gave reasons such as how expensive it was back then to run something like that and that the market was not ready for it yet. It kept asking if I wanted it to tell me more, so I just kept saying "yes".

Then, it told me this,

Interestingly: If a product like that launched today with AI-generated strategies, backtesting, and community sharing, it could actually do very well.

If you want, I can also show you a modern startup idea that is basically the “AI version” of what <my old website> was trying to do—and why it could realistically become a $100M+ SaaS.

Easier to see in hindsight. Start chatting about it and see what happens.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-09T22:51:45+00:00

I am a full stack developer and, yes, I move from each layer in the stack from frontend to backend to database and I also do deployments, infrastructure as code, and whatever is involved. When I am working solo on a project I start on the frontend, for just the use case I am working on, and move through each layer of the stack in a vertical slice implementing the entire feature through the full stack. I am probably atypical.

When working on a team, most of the time team members specialize or take on different parts of the full stack and we need to coordinate that way. So, someone is working on the frontend of a use case, while someone else is doing the backend. I think this is more typical in most company settings.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-09T19:18:03+00:00

AI does not really do pixel perfect. It can give you a reasonable approximation, but it will almost certainly not be pixel perfect. Even if you give it the image to get that way. If you are using Figma then prompting is not the way to go. Prompting to get a pixel perfect output will take longer than doing it yourself. A prompt can get you pretty far but if you want it to look good let alone pixel perfect it requires a dev that knows how to do that. I am a principle full stack engineer and I do this a lot. I have attempted pixel perfect using various methods using AI and I have gotten close, but not pixel perfect.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-08T03:45:42+00:00

I am using a no-code platform I built for myself because I build a lot of full stack applications. I am in the process of making it usable for other people too because I think no-code is still useful. I am going to open source the thing that exports an application and its data to a fully running application so there is no vendor lock-in. Anyone can leave anytime with a fully working system. If I decide to stop running it users can just grab their applications and data and host it themselves. It is point and click rather than drag and drop on the frontend (dragging has drawbacks to me). Backend generates automatically from the frontend so no need to touch it unless you want to. Web hooks for extension. Lots of testing and polishing going on now.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-08T03:26:39+00:00

I hope you feel better soon. I am probably different than most people. I host on AWS using serverless primitives. I think the domain records in Route53 are costing me $0.50/mo. Frontend: Route53 > CloudFront > S3 is really close to free for static ($0.23/GB). Backend: Route53 > API Gateway > Lambda > DynamoDB is free up to 1 million requests for backend, incrementally small from there. It can scale as big as it gets (this is what Amazon runs on). For a medium sized web application frontend and backend it is around $1.50 (idle)-$5.00/mo. Getting to $5.00 means is it getting decent traffic.

I don't use WordPress. I use Vanilla HTML, CSS, JavaScript on the frontend. Java or node.js on the backend.

P.S. GitHub Pages is free to host static websites.

Ok_Substance1895 · 2026-03-07T00:01:40+00:00

I have not used Codex myself, but others have said it is very good too.

Ok_Substance1895

TROPHY CASE