megalomanu

Thank you for your comment. I didn't intend to tell a feel good story. I'm just a seed startup founder, I'm not DHH! I'm just sharing a personal story that helps me navigating into the storm. There is no message here, I guess I hadn't been clear enough.

He just vibe-repaired cars!

Joke aside, it was not shoeing horses but also working on the carts, etc. Probably bikes too. So at least he reused some mechanical skills, and probably tools, he already had. Only the engine was really new.

And many people living in small villages back then had basic knowledge in many disciplines, including electricity. When you had a farm for instance, you needed to be able to repair yourself anything.

Author here! Thanks for all the comments. This post isn't meant as a lesson or a judgment, something to tell "just shut up and adapt like my ancestor did". The situation is hard, and I wasn't trying to dismiss anyone's anxiety. No one wants to hear "you'll be fine" when something bad just happened.

It's mostly a personal story. You can see it as a kind of tribute to a great-great-grandfather I never met, partly because I'd never heard a story like it before. It's banal but still a big adventure in the family. I find it fascinating that he grew up in a completely different world from mine and still felt some of the same doubts and anxieties I do today. And I'm really proud of him, because his "pivot" let my family stay in the village instead of maybe leaving to work in factories in the city. My father loved his job, and in a way that's thanks to him.

On my end, becoming a dad didn’t make me less ambitious, just more focused.

I was vp of engineering at a Series A startup when my kid was born. It was a challenging job, but one that felt increasingly devoid of any meaning for me (maybe also because I'd been there for 5 years). I was compensating by working on side-projects at night and on weekends. I even wrote a novel that took me 4 years to finish.

Then my son was born, and nights and weekends disappeared! Suddenly, all my non-father activity was dedicated to a job that was boring me more and more. So what did i do? I started a company, so I could decide what to work on during the day!. Basically, I took a side project and put it at the center of my working life. Now my days feel rewarding enough that when I disconnect, I can completely devote myself to my son and my wife and ignore everything else.

Of course, I don’t have side projects anymore. I barely even have hobbies: I completely stopped watching movies, which used to be the love of my life. I read books before bed and on the subway, and work out occasionally to stay sane. My life = my startup, my son, my wife. That’s pretty much it.

But I feel much more balanced than before, when I was always chasing something.

Congrats to the team! Fantastic editor, it really brought me joy after years of VSCode/Cursor. I love how it's crafted, you can feel the soul behind each decision.

What I love:

- the speed, of course

- the high consistency between features, tabs, and panes, while Cursor looks like a crumbly assemblage of plugins. At first I was worried about the lack of plugins, but Zed made me realize you don't need many

- the visual elegance: the padding, the proportions... It reminds me of the best of JetBrains (though I haven't used their products in years). It feels closer to the IDEs I used in the past (for Java or C#), in the sense that it seems to encompass everything you need, without the heaviness.

- the numerous keyboard shortcuts, often displayed visibly, which makes them easier to remember

- the transparency of their roadmap and their velocity: now that we finally have the vertical git diff as promised, my doubts are gone!

Truly one of my favorite pieces of dev software in 15 years.

Looks fantastic! Growing up on RollerCoaster (+Transport) Tycoon and SimCity myself, this is exactly the kind of project I'd dream about building, if only I had your dedication!

Never tried coderabbit, just because this is already good enough with Claude Code. It helped us to catch dozens of important issues we wouldn't have caught. We gave some instructions in the CLAUDE.md doc in the repository - with including a nice personalized roast of the engineer that did the review in the intro and conclusion to make it fun! :) Basically, when you do a "create PR" from your Claude Code, it will help you getting your Linear ticket (or creating one if missing), ask you some important questions (like: what tests have you done?), create the PR on Github, request the reviewers, and post a "Auto Review" message with your credentials. It's not an actual review per se but this is enough for our small team.

It is for generating a big nested JSON, quite complex from a business standpoint (lots of different business concepts). We didn't have good results with simple models.

We just tested magistral-medium as a replacement for o4-mini in a user-facing feature that relies on JSON generation, where speed is critical. Depending on the complexity of the JSON, o4-mini runs ranged from 50 to 70 seconds. In our initial tests, Mistral returned results in 34–37 seconds. The output quality was slightly lower but still remain acceptable for us. We’ll continue testing, but the early results are promising. I'm glad to see Mistral prioritizing speed over raw power, there’s definitely a need for that.

I highly recommend trying Qobuz! Artists are paid more, the catalog is rich and comprehensive (I recommend to early users who might have felt a lack of content to give it another try, as it's now much richer), most albums are available in Hi-Res Audio, the UI is nice, there is no fluff (just music, nothing more), and most importantly, content is curated, with many articles written by critics and journalists, artist interviews, and, for each album, a small review or a piece of text informing about the album's significance. Compared to the awesome but "industrial" recommendation system of Spotify, this is something more personal and curated which, in my opinion, better helps to understand some music genres.