jackzhuo

maybe add your age before commenting this post. :)

most Chinese models are now open-source, whereas ppenai, claude, and gemini are closed; for example, deepdeek, the release of its every new model is accompanied by a corresponding research paper, and it now fully supports huawei's new chips.

I had stopped using Cursor since July 2025, because of its mess pricing policy.

Now I use codex & claude code & antigravity, and can not return to using Cursor.

100% this. I used to default to Postgres for everything. But seeing SQLite handle concurrency so well now—plus having built-in BM25 search and vector support—it really is all you need for these kinds of architecture.

Same experience here. I now think AI writes much better code than me. So I shifted my focus to finding requirements, analyzing possibilities, and making good plans.

Absolutely! Excel is the ultimate business system because it’s a database that anyone can actually use. Excel is the best because it gives people the power to manage data without needing to be an expert.

I still use TypeScript because I know it best. When AI makes a mistake, I can find the bug much faster. For me, the speed of writing code doesn't matter as much as the speed of fixing it.

I think this works well if you’re already a practitioner in a domain and have repeated exposure to its problems.

For many indie developers, though, that assumption doesn’t always hold. We’re often not domain experts, and starting purely from personal pain can be misleading if the pain isn’t shared or frequent enough.

In my experience, the challenge isn’t “starting from yourself” vs “starting from keywords”, but figuring out how to get close enough to a real problem space to develop that kind of insight in the first place.

This describes my situation almost exactly, and it’s what triggered my reflection.

I built a “product” starting from keywords, but then realized I didn’t actually know where the users were, or how to talk to them. There was no obvious place for real feedback.

Starting from keywords let me ship something, but it also meant I was missing the professional context around the problem — the deeper understanding you only get by being inside the system where the frustration exists.

In hindsight, I think I optimized for building something, not for being close to the problem itself.