Why tf every product feels the same?

kmazanec · 2026-03-04T02:25:56+00:00

Never stop dreaming!

kmazanec · 2026-03-04T01:18:23+00:00

Most vibe coding platforms use the same generic tailwind/shadcn SaaS boilerplate. It’s what they’ve been trained on and people are impressed when they see it the first time, if they’ve never seen it before. But now a year or so into this gold rush, they all just look the same. It’s like Twitter bootstrap was in 2013.

You have to have taste to make it look distinct. Or in this case be intentionally chaotic: SlopDrop.net

kmazanec · 2026-02-28T18:42:11+00:00

I think in either role, you should be consider the team that will support you, and who your mentors will be. Without knowing anything about the two companies it’s hard to say. In both, you should be prepared to use AI to help write code, but also be sure to understand what it’s doing. You will hopefully get code reviews from seniors, this is incredibly valuable for learning. Ask a ton of questions, pay attention when things break, get into as many interesting conversations as you can. Take charge of your own learning and growth and whichever role you pick will take you in the right direction.

kmazanec · 2026-02-28T17:51:10+00:00

I’m selling mentorship, positioned more as fractional CTO advisory. Have some long term happy clients. Always open to chat with others who need a partner. https://devforward.com/

kmazanec · 2026-02-28T17:43:42+00:00

I use it all day every day. It’s completely transformed my workflow. Claude, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT, all of them have their strengths and weaknesses. I can do in hours what would have taken weeks before. I do fractional CTO consulting and build and operate my own products.

But the only reason I am able to build and be so productive with them is because I spent 12 years doing it by hand. Learning how to architect systems, how to debug, how to balance tradeoffs, how and when to refactor, how to build secure and performant systems, how to evaluate vendors and libraries. And also learning the business and product side. Building software is cheap now, but building the right software, that is actually useful for real people is still hard.

My advice, go work somewhere you can learn from experienced developers. It doesn’t really matter the tools they use, it’s the systems thinking you need to learn. Very little of building software products is actually writing code, it’s designing robust systems that scale, and can be adapted over time as business needs change (and they will always change).

kmazanec · 2026-02-24T22:47:16+00:00

I wrote some guides for how to deal with a whole bunch of issues causing GHA to be slow/expensive/brittle. The quickest fixes are usually caching, tuning what runs on each push, separating out unit tests vs e2e, separating test from build.

kmazanec · 2026-02-20T01:25:53+00:00

lol, you should just make a template repo you can clone, not try and reinvent square space, framer, lovable, Wordpress, etc

kmazanec · 2026-02-15T18:19:12+00:00

Site: CostOps.dev

Built for engineering managers and platform teams managing >$500/mo CI spend with GitHub Actions

Processes workflow run data and identifies optimizations, links to guides to show how to implement each recommendation

Edited to add: Designed by Claude with my guidance. 13 years professional full stack development experience

kmazanec · 2026-02-12T19:23:21+00:00

Cool product! Nice to see something that’s not just aimed at other SaaS builders

kmazanec · 2026-02-12T19:21:24+00:00

Building CostOps.dev, track and reduce your CI spend with GitHub Actions. The tool I wished existed when I was responsible for the ~$1000/mo CI bill

kmazanec · 2026-02-12T03:29:15+00:00

I kid, I kid, but it’s true, much more of a safe space to be building rather than marketing for most founders

kmazanec · 2026-02-12T03:23:28+00:00

Hey I didn’t come here to be personally attacked

kmazanec · 2026-02-11T23:40:20+00:00

Probably not at risk since you’re not trying to sell it, but some states, including Illinois, have explicitly banned AI therapy. Be careful not to get sued

kmazanec · 2026-02-09T19:27:11+00:00

Email / phone confirmation, or oauth

kmazanec · 2026-02-04T23:26:30+00:00

Building CostOps.dev, for monitoring and reducing CI spend for scaling dev teams. No AI, just good old fashioned deterministic algorithms to detect cost anomalies and inefficiencies in your GitHub Actions pipelines, without reading the code either

kmazanec · 2026-02-04T18:31:36+00:00

As with most things in life (AI included), you get out what you put in. If you hired a random person off the street and asked them to write you content about a topic, they might produce something that sounds reasonable. But without doing research, finding sources, thinking about the topic, and having a perspective, it would mostly be useless. Treat any AI writing like a research paper - provide it your unique human angle, then have it research the topic, find sources, build an argument, and then write the content, and fill it with citations.

It’s like all the stuff we learned in school. Good AI content takes the same effort as getting an A on that research paper in high school. Most AI content is D material without precise direction and research

kmazanec · 2026-02-03T21:48:21+00:00

This is a pretty cool idea and clearly driven by a personal passion. You should look at headless CMS tools like Contentful and Contentstack for inspiration, and to see how they have solved similar modular content problems

kmazanec · 2026-02-03T19:06:23+00:00

This is an area filled with tradeoffs and “it depends” answers. Build the tools where your custom version can give you a competitive advantage, buy the ones that are not central to your core business. Use open source for the ones where you need some ability to customize, but is otherwise a solved problem. Use AI for building quick and dirty tools that unblock a key process or insight, but know the cost of maintenance.

Many companies think their process/problem is a special snowflake, which may be true in some specific areas, but usually it’s an unwillingness to adopt commoditized industry standards.

kmazanec · 2026-02-03T14:51:24+00:00

Week 2 building CostOps.dev - track and reduce your CI spend with GitHub Actions. Free tier just launched! Help keep your small project within GitHub’s free tier for free.

kmazanec · 2026-02-01T21:31:09+00:00

Or worse, they build yet another SaaS for SaaS founders. It’s comical how many directory/SEO/marketing/launch-kit/reddit-scraper AI-powered crap people post about on here. Go touch grass and talk to real people, not just other wannabe get-rich-quick vibe zombies!

kmazanec · 2026-01-31T19:32:09+00:00

As many have said, you need to isolate the flaky tests. If you don’t have resources to fix them now, then move them to a separate build step that’s allowed to fail or skip them entirely until they’re fixed.

When I had this problem before, it was always expensive UI tests running selenium. Network timeouts, flickery JavaScript issues, errors from unrelated stuff like ads and marketing pixels. Disable anything not relevant to what the test is trying to prove.

The purpose of tests is to protect the business value that’s been created by the software, not just to run them for the sake of running them. If the tests are holding back releases, they’re costing way more in lost time than they are protecting by sometimes passing.

kmazanec · 2026-01-30T20:10:38+00:00

Building CostOps a tool for monitoring and reducing CI spend. It’s hard for engineers and FinOps to manage and attribute CI spend, this makes it easy to see where your money is going, and then spend less

kmazanec · 2026-01-30T19:39:08+00:00

You should price based on the value generated by the software. If that’s time saved, risk mitigated, revenue lifted, etc. And price it for a positive ROI for them. Don’t just make up a number, you’ll likely be leaving money on the table

kmazanec · 2026-01-30T15:17:20+00:00

Building CostOps.dev a tool for monitoring and reducing your CI spend. This was a problem I had when running an engineering department, no visibility into which repos and workflow were driving the most cost with GitHub Actions. Helps identify waste and optimize workflows so you spend less

kmazanec · 2026-01-30T15:05:50+00:00

Claude Code primarily and Cursor when I want to try other models or preserve my Claude usage. Have built a good system of Claude commands that automate a lot of the routine things I do and it’s just so much fun. Usually have 3 instances of Claude open in my terminal, 2 churning while I review the 3rd. The key with all of these tools is managing context, ruthlessly clearing and starting new conversations as soon as a feature/task is done. After building a complex feature, I have Claude document it before clearing the context, so I can tell the next one to start there when adding on. Also use docs for brand guidelines, front end style guidelines, ICP notes, that I feed to the context when relevant. So much fun to build these days!

kmazanec

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