I definitely identify with the "Thinker" described in this post, but I am routinely mulling over ideas and problems (multiple hours, days, and weeks) with the help of LLMs now.
One of the benefits of LLM usage is to figure out the boundaries of your own knowledge and that of humanity's existing knowledge--at least for the LLM's training data.
Enumerating through existing options and existing solutions to problems gets you to the knowledge boundary sooner--where the real work begins! While faster with LLMs, I don't see this process as much different than bouncing ideas off of colleagues (and critiquing your own thoughts).
However, the difference is likely human's unpredictable ability to apply creativity throughout the process...such that a new solution may arise at any point and leap-frog existing solutions/explanations. (Think Einstein taking known data from Lorentz, Michelson, Morley plus Maxwell's equations on light and coming up with special relativity.)
I'm developing a new programming language, so I have to provide a way for LLMs to know about and generate code for a language they have not seen (i.e., have no training data for).
My tooling was previously adding in AI hints with CLAUDE.md, Cursor Rules, Windsurf Rules, AGENTS.md, etc., but I recently switched to using only AGENTS.md and SKILLS. I appreciate the standardization from this perspective.
> Yet, this is our chance. This is our chance to actually build a company. We have to take it. Another chance may never present itself.
Bah! Two weeks or bust? This is a very short-sited viewpoint: think long term! Slow down and think about what another 3 or 6 months of runway would do for your company and product.
You have skills people want. Do some consulting and give yourself a longer runway. If you truly believe you've got a good product and business on your hands, then find a way to keep it going even if it's on the side while you do a consulting gig. (I know split-focus for a few months is not ideal, but "two weeks or bust" seems like a poor alternative.)
I'd like to see some more information about the local setup, including hardware and the postgresql.conf. Otherwise, this tells me very little in terms of comparison.
Been there, done that. I rm -rf'd a bunch of important files once, and at the time grep was giving me "memory exhausted" errors. I was able to use strings to grab all of the text of the disk, and then wade through the results with vim.