rdrd

Yes I too have found newer models (mostly Opus) to be much better at iterative development. With that being said if I have very strong architectural/developmental steer on what I believe the output should be [mostly for production code where I thoroughly review absolute everything] it’s better to have a documented spec with everything covered rather than trying to clean up via an agent conversation. In the team I’m in we keep all plan.mds for a feature, previously before AI tooling we created/revised these plans in Confluence, so to some degree reworking the plan is more an artefact of the previous process and not necessarily a best practice I don’t think.

First you have to be very specific with what you mean by idiomatic code - what’s idiomatic for you is not idiomatic for an LLM. Personally I would approach it like this:

1) Thoroughly define step-by-step what you deem to be the code convention/style you want to adhere to and steps on how you (it) should approach the task. Do not reference entire files like “produce it like this file”, it’s too broad. The document should include simple small examples of “Good” and “Bad” idiomatic code as you deem it. The smaller the initial step-by-step guide and code conventions the better, context is king with LLMs and you need to give it just enough context to work with but not enough it causes confusion.

2) Feed it to Opus 4.5 in planning mode and ask it to follow up with any questions or gaps and have it produce a final implementation plan.md. Review this, tweak it, remove any fluff and get it down to bare bones.

3) Run the plan.md through a fresh Agentic session and see what the output is like. Where it’s not quite correct add those clarifications and guardrails into the original plan.md and go again with step 3.

What I absolutely would NOT do is ask for fixes or changes if it does not one-shot it after the first go. I would revise plan.md to get it into a state where it gets you 99% of the way there in the first go and just do final cleanup by hand. You will bang your head against the wall attempting to guide it like you would a junior developer (at least for something like this).

Even if you don’t use tailwind the tailwind UI page has some nice example options. It’s nice in that they’re all on a single page so can quickly compare what UX might work for your use case.

https://tailwindcss.com/plus/ui-blocks/application-ui/lists/...

Even outside of AI coding I have found a tremendous amount of value in using AI to produce a requirements and spec document for me to code from. The key unlock for me is asking AI to “interview” me about how this system/feature should work. As part of that process it will often ask a question that gets me thinking about interesting edge cases.

I will say I always provide an initial context document about the feature/system, to avoid us starting with trivial questions. After about 45minutes I’ll often feel I’ve covered enough ground and given the problem enough thought to really put pen to paper. Off the back of this I’ll ask it to summarise the spec and produce a document. This can be a good point to ditch AI if you are so inclined but still get value from it.

Beautiful. You can just tell when things are made with the core premise of how they wanted someone to FEEL playing it. Not some lore, not some "cool" gameplay ideas they had, not some fancy gfx concept they'd prototyped. It just feels different when you know it's been approached from a completely emotional perspective.

To be clear, the "personas" are customer/user personas. Not sure what the "fake" aspect relates to.

https://www.mural.co/blog/creating-user-personas

Just watched your video, really love the style and openness.

My only suggestion is niche it down a bit. The SQL tutorial guides and features sound great, but the functional list feels a bit like a laundry list. Even here you describe it as a tool for "developers/founders/teams".

Try targeting a specific domain, tech stack, database type, or developer segment (e.g., large B2B teams, small B2B teams, indie devs, or funded startup founders) to stand out. If you pick a clear niche, you can build a stronger SEO strategy around long tail keywords and tailor both the product and the messaging and work out what order to build out features. Even if long term you plan on wanting it to be a tool for all databases, segments etc.

It's much easier to produce content with this in mind, e.g. if you were targetting getting the most out of Postgres you could easily produce a bunch of content for PostgreSQL 18 which formally came out of beta a few weeks ago and has native support for UUIDv7 etc.

Fwiw I’m doing a ton with SQLite atm as a solo dev. If your landing page had said "THE VERY BEST TOOL FOR SQLITE MANAGEMENT TO HELP SOLO DEVS AND SMALL TEAMS MAXIMIZE SQLITE PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY" there’s a good chance I would have signed up for updates but atm it felt a little generic, some of the features I might use, some I definitely would not.

True. 99% won't care, but that shouldn't hold you back. You get outsized returns from even a handful of people caring - feedback, amplification, motivation, moral support etc.

> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product

I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.

I get the same whenever I get my daily walk in. Pure unbounded epiphany of ideas and experiments, surging with creativity. I'll revisit them a few days later and for 90% of them my immediate internal response is "that sounds like a really sh*t idea".

As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it.

Here's what I've done:

- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas

- My content has to be useful to one of those

- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it

- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it

- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it

- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it

I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.

One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.

"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval

I get an immense amount of pride when I see anything that the Royal Museum Greenwich do because not only is it very local to me but they have such a great way of balancing the history of maritime/meridian with modern services and facilities.

If you’re coming to London please spend a day in Greenwich, you won’t regret it, take in the museums, the small markets, the observatory, stroll round the park, grab a photo of the best view in London (imo) https://www.rmg.co.uk/royal-observatory/attractions/enjoy-be... - then take a walk along the Thames, once you’re done you can hop on an Uber boat and head into central London.

I find the wordsmithery on Meta's statement the most interesting:

“We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”

Even though it was a long time ago I still have IE6/7 workarounds burned into my brain, most of them float related but also having a whole stylesheet for that damn browser... <!--[if lte IE 6]>:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/universal-ie6-css/

I remember working for a client who needed to support IE6 (with all the insane bugs/quirks/limitations) and I’d despair every time the designers would hand over a Photoshop design with rounded corners. They also needed it to be responsive (at the time mostly just different desktop sizes). Would usually require cutting the corners out and positioning them in table cells. There’s a certain amount of dev resilience you build having to do stuff like that by hand!

I have noticed a few people grumbling that the slow requests for Gemini in particular are taking upwards of 4-5 minutes to complete. I have noticed a massive decline in the slow request responses for Gemini in the last 48 hours too.

For transparency it looks like this user works for GoDaddy based on a previous HN comment where they link to their GoDaddy email address. My personal recommendation based on customer experience and privacy is Namecheap or Porkbun.

I think we’ve all worked with people that fall into these when it comes to PR time.

Smart and energetic - "I think this covers everything functionally and I’ve added a couple of extra unit tests for the functions I had to refactor”

Smart and lazy - "This covers everything but I’ll add the unit tests in a follow up PR shortly" [never happens]

Dumb and energetic - "Can you review this ASAP please, it’s only small, shouldn’t have any bugs or issues. I just need to get this in because <manager> is looking for this feature ASAP. I will fix any issues in a follow up PR." [prod issue w/ feature after go-live]

Dumb and lazy - <Raises PR, fails CI tests, doesn’t respond to any feedback for a week> [feature 3 weeks late]

I guess pick your poison on the last 2?

I’ve enjoyed using it to create random test data in csv format, something I would usually do mashing together a few APIs and a Python script. Just today I asked for a large number of rows with several different column types, including first name, last name and random date of births in ISO 8601 format. After generating very US-centric names I asked for UK based names, which it again modified and generated a very sane dataset for, but I wanted it more culturally diverse, so a final re-prompt of “can you make the names more culturally diverse” and voila, it was done. What might have taken me an hour to produce in the past was done in 2 mins.

Having worked on a couple of iOS banking apps there’s a few reasons:

1. Additional security frameworks to help with anti-tampering, often from 3rd parties who have little desire to decrease their frameworks size. Surprising amount require frameworks for mapping/location, photos, camera, bluetooth etc due to anti-fraud and fingerprinting checks

2. Many bank apps obfuscate their binaries/code which increases size

3. Many have huge backwards compatibility requirements so end up always having older frameworks or multiple versions in some cases

4. Often large number of devices need to be supported as such they may have interface files and image assets for say iPhone and iPad, these can and should be stripped out but often aren’t

5. Many banks also have single codebases supporting multiple brands of their banks and subsidiaries, or for their business vs personal vs premier/VIP/platinum customers, they use asset catalogs etc to reskin each but theres often bloat from the overlap

6. Lots and lots of legacy code which often never gets removed. Many still have Objective-C code/dependencies for example

7. There’s often a surprising amount of functionality in banking apps that goes amiss by most users who only really use it to check their balances, eg Cheque scanning/OCR, biometrics (beyond Face ID / Touch ID), receipt management, business or premier customers may have chat or video facilities with their relationship manager etc

I won’t labour the point but you’re mistaken, nodes ARE traditional cloud/web based systems. All you have to do is check https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types to see that, 65% of Ethereum nodes are hosted and 25% of those are on AWS. Blockchain is built on existing infrastructure, there is no silver bullet availability it’s offering.

So you’ll build a load balancer for the nodes you might connect to, is what you’re saying, and where will you host said load balancer? Wherever you host it that’s the availability level you’ll achieve. High availability is not a feature of the blockchain, if you would of said data resilience, I might have agreed, but availability, no, that falls into the same availability standards as any other computing platform.

This doesn’t quite hold. It’s only as “up” as the node you’re connecting to is, if that node is down then for all intents and purpose the “blockchain” is down as far as your ability to access it is concerned.

I don’t believe it has any current benefit when linked to physical real world actions/items, companies who make broad brush statements like “it can help increase supply chain transparency” really are missing the fact there’s better/easier ways to do that sort of thing.

That being said I think it does have good applicability to digital-only activities which require trust, a good example might be Poker, I think generally we believe that a company like Pokerstars are fair and honest so when we jump online to play a game we don’t question it, but there may come time when that’s not the case - where we don’t trust the software created by casinos and bookmakers. So I think generally speaking, right now, gambling is the number 1 use case for Blockchain in my opinion. There’s definitely challenges in this space though, for example building a Poker game on Ethereum would be impossible at the moment, transaction cost for each move would be completely cost prohibitive and there’s still challenges with random number generation, but these problems are solvable.

The other thing I think about with blockchain is generally speaking the view is that they should, in theory, outlast tech companies, as the view is that these public ledgers would be maintained collectively by society, it would be nice to be able to keep certain forever record to pass through generations of families to avoid things getting lost in the digital world, but that’s hope, hope that the blockchain you choose is maintained etc, so that’s just as much of risk as now - but it pains me I don’t know much about my great great grandparents, and would hope future generations don’t have that same problem, I wouldn’t want to rely on tech companies to help with that, it would be much nicer to have a record which is decentralized.

I appreciate your honesty, and sharing this may just save someone else from making a similar mistake with Upwork. So thank you.

Having read over this and a few other replies I would definitely say it would be worthwhile taking a step back now, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy and continue to burn through cash/time building things you think will help, spend a bit of time away from the keyboard, reading The Mom Test as others have suggested, it’s honestly a fantastic book, very actionable and probably won’t take you long to get through. That will put you in the right mindset for where you are in your journey and what you need to do next - which boils down to trying to validate some of your ideas, the correct way.

Finally you mention someone offering mentorship/advice, and you taking it, just be cautious with who you take advice from, the best person to take advice from is probably someone a few steps ahead of you, that means finding someone who may have just secured their very first bit of seed money as a solo/duo founding team, or an indiehacker who’s reached say $1000 MRR for a B2C app.

Good luck.

This is a good example of falling into the trap of picking something too broad, "pet lovers", which leads you down the rabbit hole of generating features you think the average pet lover is interested in and would find useful.

I think the B2C space is neigh on impossible to penetrate in the pet space, most pet lovers form sub-communities on existing social networks (see pets on Instagram or puppy101 on reddit), you would need something very special to be able to get the average person to maintain an app on their phone just to engage with other pet lovers.

I'd flip it on its head and look for B2B niche within the pet lovers industry if you're exploring pivots. A good example of friction I've found recently is pet sitting, dog walking and doggy day care, currently we have a pup which goes day care and we use 4/5 apps to manage this process - to find one we used Google, but then cross-referenced with something like Instagram to get a feel for how they are on their dog walks, to sign up we had to fill out a questionnaire via another web app, after accepting our pup they sent us a waiver/legals to sign from another app, after which they directed us to another app on the App Store to book/cancel day care each week, must be done by Sunday lunch, but it never reminds us... they send invoices each month via email, which we have to then hop over to our banking app to pay manually, they send us pups "report card" and photos via WhatsApp.

I'm sure a small pet walking business or individual dog walkers would happily pay X amount each month to provide an integrated services to manage a lot of this, but more importantly it would be very easy to validate whether this is something the market wants, by just talking to some of these independent pet sitters to understand what pain points they have.

There's not really personal implications of messing stuff up, if you contract outside IR35 as a Limited company most clients require you to have Indemnity insurance, which costs around £20 a month and gives you a couple million of cover.

Tax and accounting is easy, a good accountant for c. £100 a month will cover everything for you such as payroll, any accountancy questions and preparing your end of year company tax returns (CT600) as well as your personal self assessment each year. Honestly the most I have to do each month is send an invoice to the client which takes about 10 minutes and tag a couple of business transactions in FreeAgent every couple of weeks.

Keeping a pipeline of work is obviously the trickier part, but once you get your first couple of contracts (probably via a recruitment agent) then you quickly build up a network of other independent contractors you can reach out to as well as any other permanent members of staff you worked well with who have moved to new roles etc.