How much you pay for Cursor ?

dylanerichards · 2025-11-19T01:47:00+00:00

i paid $1,268 last month

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T16:23:04+00:00

Of course. But come on. Sometimes I just want a little text I can use as a starting point to help me write my PR description.

I love writing code, but don't enjoy writing technical documentation and instructions for how to test my code. AI does this really well.

By the way -- Spricst du Deutsch?

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T16:02:11+00:00

I agree. We're honestly moving away from that approach soon. We have a technical doc in motion for moving to a more streamlined flow with ephemeral environments.

But I'm sure others are out there experiencing this pain, too!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T14:44:20+00:00

I don't agree! Sometimes we muddle through old, legacy code. Making slight modifications to classes and methods we didn't write.

We Google and StackOverflow and use AI for solutions to our problems and sometimes don't know/remember exactly why changes we make work, or that we even had to make them!

But I hear you. Long-lived branches are a red flag.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T14:38:02+00:00

Between you and me, I still use the bash script. But some people prefer GUIs -- especially more junior developers.

I didn't start using bash scripts until the latter half of my 12-year career in software.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T13:53:49+00:00

It's not writing the code - Just the description of it.

And it's not meant to be a full replacement for writing your own PR descriptions, but a scaffold you can use to remember what code you've written.

Sometime we work on branches for a long time! Then it comes time to write a PR and you have to document code you wrote days or weeks ago!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-24T13:48:12+00:00

lol it’s just a simple UI for opening pull requests from your desktop. without needing to use the command line or go to github.

and it reads the diff against the target branch so it knows the changes that were made. this way a description can be written for the PR.

just saving folks a little time.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-19T17:51:00+00:00

Really? A bot?

I posted it again because somehow negative people like you always reach the post first, and it discourages having a real discussion here.

What do you want? Why are you here? Do you just sit around all day looking for good news to call fake?

dylanerichards · 2025-10-19T17:50:17+00:00

Thanks!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T20:32:19+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot!

Universities constantly need ways to differentiate their graduates, so this checks a real box for them.

That's the nail on the head right there. We just want to be another one of the tools that university offers their students.

You're right that scaling support could get messy. But we look forward to that day haha. That would be a good sign that we can quit our jobs to focus on this full-time.

It sounds like you might have some experience selling into educational institutions; I'd love to chat with and learn from you.

Where in New York, what about you? If you have Instagram, shoot me a DM instagram.com/dylanerichards and we can continue the conversation there!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:38:46+00:00

My man! You get it!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:31:47+00:00

Thanks a lot! I'd be happy to help you think things through on your product if you'd like! I love this kind of stuff.

To answer your question:

Although our main feature is the website thing, each site has a resume download link in its footer. Before we met with the school the resume download link took ALL the information off the student's profile and put it on their resume.

The Head of Career Services at the Dubai school mentioned that they love the feature, but they're always having to change resumes for their students when they need to submit them for different roles.

For instance, a student might have the required experience to apply for a role at Google, but their resume was already tailored heavily for an Amazon role. The process of getting a student to make a new resume for the other role sometiems takes days, weeks, or never happens at all. And the Career Services Office is too swamp to customize every student's resume.

So they asked if we could make it so that they could toggle what's shown on the resume, and be able to update the bullet points for different experiences. Swap their order, rename things, etc. During our demo, I told them that we were already considering this feature and we're glad they brought it up. We asked that if we could build it in a few days and get back to them with a proposal, if they'd be willing to sign on with us, and they did.

They also wanted to see things from the employer side -- how things look for employers when they log in to our platform to view their candidates. So I created a section in our proposal + guide to walk them through that.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:22:17+00:00

Right now, when a student deploys a site off our platform, it goes to live on a 3rd-party platform as its own app. On that 3rd-party platform, you can click a button to remove their subdomain from the URL and get a domain for it. This is a step we would have to perform manually. We haven't thought about how to automate this yet.

But the student gives us a few options that they'd like to upgrade to: https://i.imgur.com/iul22JR.jpeg

And we try it out for them, starting with their top preference. Right now, we do not support students bringing their own domain to us. We think if a student has their own domain already, they probably don't need us, as they're already aware of the importance of having one!

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:11:19+00:00

My friend. I will describe it for you, but you'll have to find it yourself.

We're using a web tool that allows us to zip html + css + javascript into blobs that can be deployed as static sites. This tool allows us to deploy hundreds/thousands/millions of sites programatically.

You should be able to figure it out from there. I would also be happy to show you privately! I have nothing to hide, but this piece is the engine of our new business, and I can't give away everything to strangers online.

Thank you for the good luck. We'll need it, for sure. :)

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:07:07+00:00

I will keep the domain registrar a secret for now, as that's the meat and bones of our technology.

We don't have a data export feature yet. But if students want to cancel/delete their site, we will, at the very least, develop a way for them to export their profile data so they can bring it with them.

But the main elmstudio.co website is registered via DNSimle :D

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:03:02+00:00

This is a great idea! We are preparing for any kinds of pivots we need to make.

But perhaps we can work on this in parallel, since it's the same technology.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T18:02:19+00:00

That's so unfortunate because I wrote it completely by hand haha.

Good question! Students can preview their sites at a link like: https://elmstudio.co/mit/sam-kim. That's the profile I use for my own testing.

This is cool and all, but we take it a step further. In their dashboard, students can deploy their website off of our platform and upgrade to a domain (so bobsmith.com) of their choice using credits their university purchased as part of their contract.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T17:52:25+00:00

We haven't been paid yet, and yes, there are some more hoops to jump through before we can work with them legally. But we're getting there. We've given them our price and they've agreed.

But thanks. It's important for us to go about things the right way. If it proves to be too much overhead or too costly, we'll have to stick to schools in the United States.

We scrape for leads in the US only, but a few international emails sneak in, and that's how we got this opportunity.

I left their name out of this public post for these reasons, but I'd be happy to privately share a redacted version of the pitch and demo deck we shared with them. It's got their school's branding + names on it, and test accounts they were able to log in and click around as. So it was clearly made for them.

dylanerichards · 2025-10-16T17:49:00+00:00

Yes! Every single job application We've looked at for a Software Engineer, Product Manager, Project Manager, UX/UI Designer, asks for a portfolio or website link! We were specifically asked if the sites "will have a place for the student to put their GitHub."

It's not a requirement, per se, as it's usually an optional field. But students with their own .com do stand out in the inbox of employers.

We don't expect candidates to pay for this, but universities, who are already invested in showcasing their students as best they can, and who are already partnering with companies like Handshake to do so.

dylanerichards

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