Ai Coding

The pitch is seductive: describe what you want in plain English, watch the code appear, ship it the same afternoon. For a solo builder, it feels like the thing that finally removes the last barrier between an idea and a shipped product. Here’s the part nobody puts on the landing page: the speed is real, but so is the bill — and it arrives on a different schedule. AI moves fast on day one. Maintenance compounds on day ninety. For a one-person team, there is no “someone else” to hand that bill to. ...

There’s a question every solo builder gets asked constantly, and it’s the wrong one: “which AI coding tool do you use?” The question implies the tool is the bottleneck — that if you just found the right assistant, the work would get easier. It won’t. The tools are roughly equal now, and the gap between them is smaller than the gap between using one well and using ten badly. This post is about the stack I actually settled on, and the part of the story that usually gets skipped: the biggest win wasn’t the tool, it was stopping the search. ...