u/AfterMeet4659

I wasted months on tutorials before I realized building stuff (even ugly stuff) teaches you 10x faster than watching videos. I had this false sense of progress where I'd finish a tutorial and feel like I learned something, but the moment I tried to build on my own I'd freeze. The turning point for me was when I forced myself to build something without following a guide. It was terrible. Ugly code, no structure, probably 15 security vulnerabilities. But I learned more in those weeks than in 3 months of tutorials.

Curious what others would change. What was your biggest waste of time or wrong turn early on?

Curious what other devs consider non-negotiable in their workflow.
For me it's probably Tailwind. I resisted it for months because I thought utility classes were messy and went against everything I learned about clean CSS. But once I actually committed to it on a real project, the speed difference was night and day. Now every time I have to write plain CSS I feel like I'm going backwards.

Close second would be TypeScript. I used to think it was unnecessary overhead but after catching bugs at compile time that would've taken hours to debug in plain JS, I can't imagine starting a project without it.

Third honorable mention - dark mode in my IDE. Not a tool exactly but if someone forced me to code on a white background I'd quit on the spot.

What's yours? And has there been something you resisted at first but now can't live without?

I’ve been experimenting with using Claude for long code generation, GPT for quick scripts, Mistral for budget-friendly bulk tasks and Gemini for large context windows. The results are genuinely better when you match the model to the task, but managing multiple API keys and subscriptions is painful. Does anyone actually do this strategically or am I over complicating things?

I've been building my product for a while now and it keeps growing in scope. Every time I think "okay, this is ready to show," I find something else to add. For those who built a complex product solo, what was the trigger that made you finally put it in front of users? A feature count? A deadline? Running out of money? Genuine curiosity because I feel like I'm stuck in this loop.

I feel like the toolchain keeps growing every year. You need an AI assistant, a code editor, a hosting provider, a CI/CD pipeline, monitoring... Before you know it, you have 6 tabs open and 4 subscriptions just to ship a simple project. What does your actual workflow look like? Has anyone simplified this or are we all just duct-taping tools together?

Everyone talks about AI being "cheap" but the bills add up fast. Especially with larger context windows and reasoning models. What's your monthly AI API  spend and what are you building? I'm trying to calibrate whether my usage is normal or I'm doing something wrong.

Open AI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Cohere, Groq… the list keeps growing. If you were building something today and had to commit to one provider, which would it be? I’m interested in the reasoning cost, quality, latency, reliability or something else?