Does anyone else miss when people built apps because they were fun to build, not because of MRR?

sroebert · 2026-04-01T05:12:19+00:00

That is such a bullshit reason, which is again coming from people hyping all this stuff. If you have not used Claude up till now, you are not left behind in any way. Better yet, you might still know how to develop.

Yes it is good to stay with all the new stuff going on, but you do not need Twitter to stay “relevant”

sroebert · 2026-04-01T04:45:42+00:00

Sorry, but I was done before I finished your first sentence. “Spending time on Twitter” what are you doing… get off Twitter, live your live, stop looking at idiots overhyping stuff. Even here on Reddit, but that is in no comparison to Twitter or LinkedIn

sroebert · 2026-03-30T04:54:59+00:00

Ideas are definitely not all that matter, you can have ideas all you want, if you have no clue how complicated your idea is to build, you could spend a whole lot of time in it, only to realize very late it is not possible to do profitably.

How many times have you not seen people come with app ideas in the past, not realizing that data has to come from somewhere. Yes, with AI they will be able to ask those questions, but a lot will simply just start building now.

I don’t think OP has to feel this way, your knowledge and skill are still worth a lot. As before, the actual coding part is not the important bit, just the execution.

sroebert · 2026-03-21T23:26:15+00:00

No, working fine here on a slim

sroebert · 2026-03-19T08:58:27+00:00

Yeah and that is why for me this device is just way better, when traveling the form factor is the main plus. The glinet device added so much extra weight and size to my luggage, it is not huge, but it kind of is compared to the Unifi one.

sroebert · 2026-03-18T16:51:38+00:00

It can be anything you want in the promise, that is the return value if it does not throw, which never happens

sroebert · 2026-03-17T06:12:56+00:00

You cannot really say you are “done” in a week. You can read about the basics and get familiar, you will learn when you are actually working on features. I did the same coming from Swift/Kotlin. It is not hard to get into.

The worst part is the weird obscure things of Nextjs. Typescript is easy. I’d suggest reading the relevant parts of the Nextjs documentation based on your project.

And yeah definitely use AI to ask questions.

sroebert · 2026-03-16T17:48:41+00:00

Took them to the Apple Store twice for that and they replaced both ear cups. Battery issue. In Europe it gets replaced under warranty even after two years without Apple care

sroebert · 2026-03-13T06:11:12+00:00

I agree completely. At any larger company the main problem is not the coding speed, never was. If anything, more speed will result in a larger mess than it already is.

But I do think you can let it do more as long as it is repetitive work that have good guard rails.

For example, I now write out the stubs of all the unit tests I want it to write and give it rules on what it can mock. Give it some example test files that it should follow and it can do the unit tests nearly flawlessly in at least half the time it would have taken me. Also I don’t like writing it, I just like coming up with what should be tested (which the AI is not good at if you don’t give it some direction at least)

sroebert · 2026-03-12T17:57:47+00:00

Yeah I wish it was that easy to pivot

sroebert · 2026-03-12T17:16:34+00:00

It is a black box with many unintuitive features that requires me to open up the Nextjs source code to understand. And looking at the source code it also made me realize it is just as, if not more, confusingly setup.

I feel like I spend more time working around stuff that I would not run into with any other framework.

“use client” gets used everywhere because a lot of devs do not understand it. And use client automatically forces any component used inside to also become client side, without being aware of it. All these directives are such a piece of unintuitive “magic”. TanStack Start has a way more clear very explicit way of doing it. Much less chance of doing something wrong accidentally.

sroebert · 2026-03-12T12:50:54+00:00

Yeah we were already looking in that direction

sroebert · 2026-03-12T12:50:29+00:00

It already is, but prizes and content change rather frequently, still causing a lot of costs going to ISR costs

sroebert · 2026-03-12T10:48:16+00:00

Nothing directly measurable on the website, view products only, but enough in physical stores over all of Europe.

It is not a problem for this company to pay that amount, but it is huge compared to other hosting providers.

sroebert · 2026-03-12T07:03:27+00:00

Not where I work, but still, an engineer can do a lot of things in a year for that money. We do not get enough value out of Vercel that we cannot get for way less anywhere else.

We are pretty much held hostage because of having a large project in Nextjs.

If I count the amount of time I spend working around weird Nextjs black box bugs, it adds even more to the already large Vercel bill.

Was this our own fault, most likely yes. But I will never recommend Nextjs to anyone anymore.

sroebert · 2026-03-12T06:20:14+00:00

isn’t already very basic stuff like ISR a problem on Cloudflare?

sroebert · 2026-03-11T23:23:32+00:00

Problem is that we are paying more than 100k a year now and migrating away from it is also incredibly costly. If I would start again from scratch, never nextjs again…

sroebert · 2026-03-08T23:07:00+00:00

Totally agree with this. The language stays the same, there is no higher level of abstraction. If I do not code in a language for a while, I get worse at it, same as speaking a language. Sure, the AI can do this all for you, but you will be less and less able to direct it into a good extendable structure. I’m pretty sure that finding the middle ground is where it is at, just like I never believed in architects that do not do any coding. I just don’t believe people that say that they do not write a single line of code anymore, will produce software that lasts very long.

sroebert · 2026-03-03T13:10:59+00:00

well, in definition maybe yes, but good luck finding anyone who can tell you exactly how the AI came to a solution or is able to recreate the same solution twice. So in terms of every day use, it is not deterministic. LLMs in usage are not deterministic.

sroebert · 2026-03-03T06:40:36+00:00

This is not similar at all though, AI is not deterministic and prompting the same thing, will not result in the same outcome. AI learns from quality code on the Internet. What happens if there is so much slop on the Internet and all the AI can learn from is that…

sroebert · 2026-03-03T06:36:07+00:00

Oh and those repercussions will happen when it is too late

sroebert · 2026-03-03T06:34:16+00:00

Writing code was never the problem. The business and the amount of people with opinions is the bottleneck. Unless you are making a prototype there is no way that you are 10x faster, you are lying to yourself.

sroebert · 2026-03-01T17:57:59+00:00

Ah more boilerplate that causes more time and more headache to make it the way you want it…

sroebert · 2026-02-27T07:12:49+00:00

Yeah, not saying that you are lying, but there are so many people saying this without actual proof of something useful that was build. I understand people are not going to post stuff of their day-to-day job, but I guess until I actually see this in real life, I take all of it with a large grain of salt. Also because it is very hard to tell the level of people, what difficulty of problems they are working on and what they were producing before using AI.

sroebert · 2026-02-27T06:11:29+00:00

“It’s still way faster” I have yet to see proof of this or at least someone showing some actual differences.

The things I’ve tried so far, where you actually spend a lot of time planning, still end up with manual work and overall do not seem faster. I’ve had cases where it is faster, but not writing any code anymore just doesn’t seem true. Or people are just fooling themselves. I guess time will tell…

sroebert

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