Comment by smolgumball
6 days ago
Anecdotally, I've found I'm far less interested in adopting new products and rethinking my workflows amidst a sea of half-baked and short-lived products / services.
Instead, I'm stripping back to basics, building small tools to solve specific problems, and find myself vastly preferring established software with a track record of keeping feature-bloat down and the problem-space focused.
LLMs have flipped the build vs buy debate on its head for me. I also have been re-evaluating existing tools and building my own custom, just-for-me versions and it's been liberating. Using off-the-shelf software increasingly feels stifling and limiting. I do wonder if the future for many SaaS companies is to provide a solid core with a nice API/MCP/Hooks/etc to build on top of so you can add features only your company cares about instead of every SaaS trying to be a one-size-fits-all.
The cool part is building smaller tools to solve your problems also allows you link those all together (MCP/CLI/API) in ways that weren't possible in the past using LLMs as a glue layer.
With regard to ‘provide a API/etc.”, companies have been trying hard to do that for a long time, even coming up with their own languages, like salesforce did.
It’s extremely hard to do, even on a basic level. And the worst part is actually the UI. You can go the Wordpress/shopify route where you allow client templates and it’s a huge cost for you to maintain. Or you can do some sort of automatic field generation and no-one’s happy.
Not only that, but your product ends up in a straight jacket, where you can’t fix any fundamental data structure mistakes because half your client integrations will break.
Me too. Even personal task planning. Dumped Trello for lists in plain text mails. Accessible and editable everywhere (I just forward the changes to myself).
I decided that I don't want a private life that needs GANTT charts or org mode for interesting projects. After half a dozen of time management books I realized that this is just another form of procrastinating: * reading a lot about time management * overcomplex tooling * shuffling time slots in a calendar
The solution is a simple (check) list as a reminder. Calendar only for hard deadlines. Plus "just do it" attitude. The rest will follow. Or not, if life is otherwise too busy -- which I simply accepted.
The results don't differ much from before. Except: less time wasted with software.
I run a stack with garbage collection for most of my tasks: I just keep things I need to do in my head, and if I think of it a lot it has references to it. If I stop thinking about it it will eventually be purged by GC :D