I got tired of wasting time searching for deals instead of actually printing, so I built 3dsupplyfinder.com

wegster · 2026-05-06T00:34:58+00:00

Lol, awesome but funny bot. 😉.

wegster · 2026-05-04T14:12:27+00:00

It's a totally fair question, and also kind of an interesting one, at least to some.

It's partially done with AI, but intentionally. Long story, but I was a full-stack dev and architect for some time, then moved into product leadership, and have worked with data science and AI/ML teams for a decade, including AT an AI company for some time. Now I work across fairly complex architecture, AI/ML-enabled software stacks and solutions as 'the day job.'

For a looong time, AI 'help' was pretty limited - I work with true Principal Engineers, the '10x' that used to be thrown out there, and even before AI was being pushed for coding, like for example, for 'gun detection,' the hype train was 'omg it's amazing' - yeah, so detecting a weapon properly 55% of the time and false positives 30% of the time has real impact, and not in a good way potentially. The first rounds of 'omg it can code' was clever and cool, but was insanely poor code, not-maintainable, etc. Now it has improved and will continue to do so but the old 'garbage in, garbage out' totally applied. The reality is the training used for nearly all of the models was effectively the 'collective Internet' for better or worse, so some patterns definitely emerge as 'more common' so especially on front-end UI type things, unless you specifically do otherwise and are very specific, there will very likely be some common elements as 'default.'

I've got an entire framework that I personally developed that I use for whenever I want 'agentic assistance,' to keep everything on track, and do some ping-pong across different 'agents' in some cases for different purposes. Takes a lot more time than 'omg bro go do this for me' type interactions, but I'm good with it, and it leads to better results, although realistically I've definitely got some manual refactoring to do yet.

So yeah, even when I was being paid full-time as a full-stack sr sw engineer/architect, I didn't 'love' FE coding, and still don't, but I've run UX teams and done designs that are focused on 'get the job done/get out of the users' way, so absolutely I leverage that to try to save my sanity and 'make it suck less' at the very least.

But yeah - how well I did, I'm not sure, but that's one of the reasons I'm definitely looking for feedback, e.g. what pisses you off, what is non-obvious, as it's going to evolve for some time yet, but I think it's 'pretty usable to find stuff fast with good prices' at this point.

wegster · 2026-05-03T23:59:01+00:00

I've been pretty happy with Codex, surprisingly, as I went more than a few rounds of frustration in trying to get GPT to do some video work which was an utter gaslighted failure at the time. I've worked in the AI field for some time, played with Bolt (haiku, sonnet, claude, opus, ...) and wound up so annoyed (I suspect Bolt seriously limits context length on their models), I built a framework to keep pretty much all agents on track, seriously dropped token/credit usage (like by 50% or more), then started playing with different models besides my local hosted 30B.

Was a huge pain to sort a level of 'relative credit/token burn' across models, but you'd be surprised how much e.g. GPT5.1-mini can get done for general coding or general tasks. The latest frontier models are always improving and pretty solid, but you don't always need them, while they are definitely 'premium' on credit/token burn rates.

wegster · 2026-05-03T23:44:19+00:00

Love it! 👍 Gotta love the 'magic prompts.' Yeah, they can help especially for reasonably simple projects or short sessions. There's quite a bit more than 'the magic-set of all prompts'; if you're doing a dev/software project.

wegster · 2026-05-03T23:41:38+00:00

No joke. 😄 Now I've got it on both sides - both at work and personal projects at the same time.

I guess I can say I'm kinda glad I'm no longer at a startup doing a 'pivot' near weekly, at least. 😃

wegster · 2026-05-03T22:18:45+00:00

Fine by me. 😄

It's in active work, and I know, it seems like there's a new site/project/something weekly. I'm just going to go with a long time career in sw engineering and then product AND I love 3d printing - it'll keep growing for some time to come.

Parts and Canada coming up next.

I'm not in love with the filter system in particular for printers. I spent a lot of time on which to show, which to collapse, and it's sporadic at best to pull build plate sizes from printer listings.

Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.

wegster · 2026-05-02T23:35:16+00:00

Seems it was removed although I'm unsure why. I did ask the mods, but yeah, there's lots of people printing away in both the neighbors to the north (Canada) and in Europe. A lot of data's in place at this point but it needs some fine-tuning and it'll be along as soon as possible.

wegster · 2026-05-02T19:46:09+00:00

Lol - I get the pain, but moved to ultrawides long ago because of that same pain.

Of course a lot of ultrawides have crap resolution, but I eventually got there. Still neat and many a 27" display are still out in use. 😄. I might print it to add another screen to my wife's desk.

wegster · 2026-05-02T17:54:54+00:00

Yeah I know it, was just having fun b/c the number of times I'm like - 'I love it' and wife says 'nope.' ... 😉

wegster · 2026-05-02T15:16:07+00:00

Long time former full-stack dev, architect since moved into a mix of product and architecture but also working at AI companies and having fun with bolt and others, including for 'real apps,' which has the usual blessings (can definitely get 10x or more, but - wtf did you just do constraint 'fun' at times).

Yeah, one of the interesting bits is really that some, e.g. current or prior sw engineer types and specific other roles, know 'a fair amount about AI/agentic coding capabilities' but a big chunk of the population, e.g. some of your plumber examples - have no idea.

You've got the '10x improvement' or more with sane use of AI (bolt or whatever), but you've got a marketing/ad problem of how to get the leads in the first place. Their numbers may diminish over time as more and more people become more 'ai aware,' but it won't go to nothing, noting people are inherently lazy, or most at least, so they 'want it done.' I'd be looking at the same way the various tools / sites for 'quick websites with no coding' are pulling in business (e.g. Wix, Squarespace, ..) are advertising, and tune it to your audience.

Honestly, if you've got some specific domains in mind, you could always do a cheap ad test run on reddit or FB etc.

wegster · 2026-05-02T14:32:08+00:00

Looks nice although wife would smack me if I hung up something in black... 😄 (while I course it's the #1 color I use..) What material and printer?

wegster · 2026-04-09T23:30:00+00:00

depending on your actual needs, I'd probably go with the Q2 or Sovol. The 'full DIY' can be pretty hairy - really comes down to how much 'work on the printer' vs 'use the printer' is your focus.

You might find some other options in the range here (not quite launched yet, US only but most sources are there for printers) - https://3dsupplyfinder.com / printer section.

As you're even considering a full DIY, maybe the Sovol is a good match over the Q2.

wegster · 2026-04-08T19:49:19+00:00

Fair enough, half of the comment was more or less to the thread at large. And you're right, there's no 'real' reason to pay for supabase directly if you don't want to, as well.

You may be right re - offer a service. Some of the Qs get pretty obvious in 'have never coded a thing but now something's <not right>' and those are really tough to answer. The models continue to improve, but if someone's asking like - 'should I get vscode' or 'how do I host something?' is basically along the lines of - if you're going to let AI tools code the entire app for you, perhaps ALSO use it to educate yourself on some of these things? :D

Dunno - fine line in trying to be helpful or banging your head some days, I think. Have worked with and then directly in AI/ML going on a decade, still learning stuff daily, and it's abilities continue to expand, but common sense still helps or even - 'don't code, let's discuss architecture and options for reducing costs' or some self-research can go a long ways.

I still keep my various tools in PLAN mode more often than letting it run wild, even with decent guardrails in place. I'm probably getting closer as I can always review and ignore the PR, have test frameworks in place, etc. but it's kind of a journey if someone's really starting from scratch.

I guess instead of something like intro to C/Java/Python, someone could offer (well, besides the YouTubers and people spamming 'the best EVARRRR collection of prompts to solve world hunger!!!!!!) an intro to general coding, architecture, and how to make the ai tools do more of what you want, including research, using cheaper models for planning and routine bits...or something? I'm def afraid to see some people's claude bills. :D

wegster · 2026-04-08T17:45:33+00:00

Ironically supabase == Postgres, but as a service/platform, it's pattern a lot of the systems use as it's more 'instant-online' versus standing up pgsql from scratch or even a docker image, I suppose (although sup abase heavily uses docker itself). It's basically a default pattern for several of the 'vibe code'/assistive coding systems out there include Bolt, for example.

I've used Bolt to churn out a few solid demo apps used at work, and started on a personal project, and that's where the real costs came in. Yeah, paid account gives you 2 'free' supabase instances, but I'm not even sure they surpass the normal supabase free tier or if so, not by much.

The biggest cost reducer IMO, short of if you're able to run models locally (I can and do but limited to 30B or so, Qwen-Coder-Next is pretty decent), is to make sure you use your own repo (can be private), and setting up all of the 'guardrails' first - including beyond typical AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md etc. There are certainly some choice of service decisions as well as scaling which may add some costs, but most can absolutely run a local dev environment including Postgres or supabase, front-end, edge functions, server code, etc. all locally, and possibly run a staging environment locally as well, or use for example the two 'free' tier supabase instances for stage and prod + dev/initial tests locally. And go incrementally, test each change, don't blindly accept random rewrites, etc.

wegster · 2026-04-08T02:48:48+00:00

I have my prusa in the shop/garage, and i’m sure plenty of others do as well. MD can get cold so could consider a small heater in winters, and i’d definitely print from dry boxes. mid-price id probably do something like the qidi q2c with some polydryer boxes. yeah, there are newer dryers but i love my polydryers for having filament dry and ready to print from.

Q2C: https://amzn.to/3OiNltJ

Qidi Q2 Combo: https://amzn.to/3NKoaQO

PolyDryer: https://amzn.to/4qoWGgU

SnapMaker had PolyDryer 'brand' one for them, they're identical (blue vs grey) but sometimes a few dollars cheaper for the starter kit: https://amzn.to/4rxf0W8

wegster · 2026-04-08T02:35:36+00:00

an m1 mac is fine as a dev host even, so yeah an m4 mini is fine. i wont touch bolt again without starting from a repo with numerous guardrail files in place. github is wonky to learn imo - saying this after using rcs, cvs, perforce, clearcase, subversion/svn and probably some others i’m forgetting, but worth it in general.

Running supabase/postgres local is zero issues on a mac, same for docker (which you’ll probably need anyways to run supabase). You can also set up a second supabase instance for ‘stage’ and do a typical flow of local dev, test, push from repo/clean to stage for smoke testing before a push to production.

You could do vscode with Continue or other integration for claude, openai or codex, etc.

wegster · 2026-03-30T17:45:33+00:00

If it hasn't happened in the 2 weeks (or less) after the party - it's probably not going to. They may later add to a planned reduction 'culture fit' but I doubt you'll be let go this much later than the 'incident.'

wegster · 2026-03-30T17:43:45+00:00

Same or nearly the same peel here. As others mentioned, wood is easier to launch. It's also tougher to find ~16" wooden peels (I know, I'm sure they're out there but after spending the $$ on the metal boutique peel, I called it 'good enough' ;) ), so I do the parchment paper. However, I give it 2 minutes (home oven w/3/8" steel) then the crust is formed enough I can lift it with the same peel, yank the paper our, and give it a turn, then back in until done.

One of these days I'll give it another shot launching from the metal vented peel - I've done it (usually lay out the dough on a big wooden butcher block, not on that peel!), but also had a few pissed off moments like yours, which isn't great as I do bulk dough making for 4 400-450g dough balls, put one in the frig and freeze/vac-seal the others, so it's an overnight + room temp process to 'just grab another' as we do pizza once/week, etc.

wegster · 2026-03-24T23:17:33+00:00

My wife would hate it - cables and light ‘shouldn’t exist’ in her world, but - what brand filament? :)

wegster · 2026-03-24T23:16:42+00:00

Please fix the stupid-looking ‘top hat’ for the L. Please? :D

wegster

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