I am a solo developer. I write most of my code by hand. I use LLMs to help me do research and to help find stuff in documentation. I also use it to do come reviews since I don't have anyone else to review the code. I do get a lot of value out of the code review. It often finds little things I missed or will tell me if my code sucks.
Really for what I am doing writing the code is never the bottleneck. I spend little of my time actually writing code. Where I spend most of my time on the design and requirements.
Microsoft built this so they can have a MongoDB compatible database service for Azure.
A few years back MongoDB changed their license to AGPL to make it harder for companies to take their code and offer it as a service. They did this because it competes with the MongoDB Atlas service.
At a past job the security team wouldn't let us have netcat or curl on our systems. So I just used /dev/TCP to get around that. The ergonomics were not as nice as using netcat or curl, but it got the job done.
I am still using VSCode. I do have the Claude Code extension, but I don't really use Claude to write code. I mainly use it for code reviews. Since I am a solo developer it is nice to be able to get a second opinion.
There is a big difference between vibe coding and using an LLM to assist with coding. Vide coding is just accepting what ever slop it outputs and saying LGTM. You are not going to get quality code that way. You need to review what it does. I often find that it uses outdated libraries and deprecated functions.
Some ways an LLM can assist with coding:
I recently needed to refactor a bunch of code. Claude was very helpful this and it completed in about 5 minutes what would have taken me a couple of hours by hand.
Also they are very handy when using new frameworks and libraries. As we all know documentation for open source projects is often lacking. Just yesterday I ran into this. I pointed Claude at the projects GitHub repo and had the answers to my questions in just a couple of minutes. Manually I would have been spending a hour or two reading the code to figure out what I needed.
They are very handy when debugging. Get a weird hours that makes no sense. Instead of banging your head against the wall for a few hours, an LLM can help you find the problem much quicker.
In a past life I was a Domino admin and I ran it on an AS/400. It was great, handled incredible amounts of load, and required little maintenance. The only outage we had was when I accidentally deleted all the databases from the file system. Even that was pretty easy to recover from.
What about the old school processors like Authorize.net and Cybersource? It has been over a decade since I worked with them, so not sure what they are like now.
It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.
If you don't need color I recommend going with a laser printer. Not only for lower consumable costs, but better software support too. In 2009 I bought a Lexmark laser printer new for $120 at Frys. It has native postscript support, so it will work with anything without having to load software from the manufacturer. I systems ranging from an old Macintosh Quadra running System 7 to new Mac running MacOS Tahoe, a PC running Windows 11 and everything in between. It even works in Linux too.
The consumables are cheap too. I have just replaced the toner cartridge once and a new OEM one was about $80 on Amazon.
Pricing is something I struggle with too. I really need to figure out my pricing model and price point as it makes a difference to some deferred architecture decisions. I can't put the decision off much longer as I'm getting to the point where I need to make a decision.
My biggest issue at the moment is that development of the MVP is taking way longer than I had initially thought. It's just me working on it and it has turned into a real grind. I am just so ready to get this done. I could hire contractors, but quality contractors are expensive and cheap ones don't deliver quality. Either way I would be burning runway and I'd rather save my money for later.
My other issue is that it is just me sitting at my home office working. I don't really have anyone that I can talk to. I started this venture after I took a sabbatical from work, so everyone IRL just thinks I'm unemployed farting around the house all day. Whereas I am working 6 days a week, I'm just not getting paid. I have tried to join some online communities, but there are just people stumping for their own start ups. I am considering joining a coworking space next year that is geared toward startups. The problem is that is also expensive, especially considering that next year I have to pay full freight on my health insurance.
Right now I am living off my investments. I have done well this year, but like others I am starting to be concerned that we might be in a bubble. I am pretty conservatively invested, but it would suck to have a prolonged 20 or 30% draw back.
I really need to bring on a cofounder to help with business development. Though I have to find someone willing to work for equity only as I don't have enough cash to pay them a salary.
So I guess you could say money is one of my biggest struggles.
In my sphere most companies are going to either Hyper-V or the cloud. Hyper-V kinda won by default as a lot of orgs already had Windows Server licenses.
Do you have any legitimate traffic coming from AWS? My thought is to just drop all traffic from their ASN. Once they can't contact you for a while they'll move along and you could unblock.
Really for what I am doing writing the code is never the bottleneck. I spend little of my time actually writing code. Where I spend most of my time on the design and requirements.