I, too, experience that. I am anxious and I overthink and I am avoidant. Vyvanse helped a ton, but it was producing health complications, so I am taking something else that's not as good.
It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart.
Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."
I super recommend Innovation. If you enjoy nuanced gameplay like in TCGs, this is for you. Everyone starts in the Stone Age and the goal is to race to 4-6 achievements, advancing through technological ages. Cards represent technologies and they have powers, like drawing cards, forcing other people to give you cards, score points, etc. It's a great game of resource management, politics, and sabotage.
I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.
Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.
You make a really salient point about having a clear vision and using clear language. Patrick Zgambo says that working with AI is spellcasting; you just need to know the magic words. The more I work with AI tools, the more I agree.
Now, figuring out those words? That's the hard part.
I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
Your experience of being better at editing than writing makes me think of advice from Alan Moore (of Watchmen fame) on writing. He says to also read bad books, because if you read only good books, you'll never realize if you unintentionally plagiarized. But if you also read bad books, you'll think, "Jesus Christ, I could write this shit," and feel liberated to analyze their writing and examine why their writing offended you.
I analyze the writing of my LLMs and I get really annoyed and frustrated and I think it's marginally improving my communication.
> First write with lots of formatting.
> Then figure out how to remove it.
> Then put it back, if you want.
In the fifth grade, we were required to write an outline for our research project essay. Imagine my delight when writing the paper was as easy as copying the outline and adding a couple extra words.
That value of formatting into bulleted lists reminds me of the McPhee method of writing, which was shared last year on HN. He manipulates physical note cards to write, and I was manipulating digital ones.
I love how vibecoding has opened the door for hyper-custom apps and scripts that benefit an exact audience of One.
Last week, I built a dynamic map to track local Play! Pokémon tournaments. It uses leafletjs and an api for an ICS file of events. I don't know what most of those words mean, but I have something perfect for me and my local competitive Pokémon community!
* Cardsphere (Magic card trading website) wishlist to inventory comparer
* Scryfall (Magic card database) search result CSV Downloader
* Cube Tagger, an app to easily tag cards with function tags for easy categorizing in cubes (boardgamified collection of Magic cards)
The vibe coding part is wonderful because I can "make" the software I want. However, it always takes hours of runs to get to where I need it to be because I'm unpracticed at project planning. I constantly hit critical edge cases and UX problems.
I get that. I am a non-programmer who vibe codes personal web apps for Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon TCG. I turn them into github pages for easy access for myself.
I don't share them with my hobby communities because I don't want to hear feedback because I don't want these finished projects to become eternal projects.
I totally get that. I have a super corpo buddy who tells me every project is 80% planning and he uses that philosophy for his personal projects. That makes sense for a huge company.
I resist working like that because I am mega ignorant and I know I will encounter problems that I won't recognize until I get to them.
But, I also HATE having to rework my projects because of something I overlooked.
My (attempted) solution is to slog through a chat with an AI to build a Project Requirements Document and to answer every question it asks about my blindspots. It mostly helps build stuff. And sometimes the friction prevents me from overloading myself with more unfinished projects!
I built a single page website that copies the current time to my clipboard and I paste it into my messages. It's inconvenient and I don't do it irregularly.
I'll have to look into the extension described in the link. Thank you for sharing. It's nice to know it's a shared problem.
I spun off geek-themed speed dating to geek themed singles mixers. They have party games, couch co-op and vs games, karaoke, and get-to-know-you games to encourage strangers to talk to each other. A drink is included with the ticket.
I tried creating my own loot box reward system where I earn points for completing tasks (literally spare change), and I can use the money to buy a die roll, with a d20 dictating what prize I got. Prizes would be things like permission to buy Pokémon cards or a full price video game, etc, with a guaranteed "high rarity" prize every X rolls.
Maybe it'd be fun to combine this with your receipts, where random tasks reward points to earn prizes.
I learned basic electronics repair from modding and building arcade controllers, aka Fightsticks. That eventually evolved into Game Boy repair, and iPod retrofitting, and electronics restoration. It's kind of like cooking; find something you want to make, then follow the directions, and then make something else, and eventually, you'll come across a problem that you have the foundation to solve.
The most basic core of practical electronics repair is that there are things that should be conductive and things that shouldn't be conductive and you need to figure out how to do either.
Seriously, though, within the context of software development, these are all issues I've encountered as well, and I don't know how to program: sweeping solutions, inability to resolve errors, breaking down all components to base levels to isolate problems.
But, again, I don't know how to program. For me, any consultant is better than no consultant. And like the author, I've learned a ton on how to ask for what I want out of Cursor.
It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart.
Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."