Pinned Tweet
Starting a business, but don't know what your mission is? How about: making your life better.
Working on the things you enjoy, at the pace you set, from wherever you want, with the people you love, so you can be happy… these are perfectly fine reasons to start something.
Courtland Allen retweeted
I flew to San Francisco and ended up doing all of this:
🏎️ (self) driving a Cybertruck
💳 attending @stripe sessions
🍻 drinking non alcoholic beer with @jrfarr
💰 making 100 no-VC founders do 20 squats
🤖 making my SaaS @DataFast_ AI agent first
👴🏻 meeting our indie hacking father @csallen
🤝 meeting my favorite indie hackers @jackfriks @illyism @sobedominik @marckohlbrugge @phuctm97 @ky__zo @yasser_elsaid_ @JohnONolan and more
🔼 meeting the G @rauchg CEO of V
🇰🇷 heading to Korea
Courtland Allen retweeted
Gym session for the father of the indie hacker movement @csallen
In 2022 indiehackers.com was my bible. I’d binge founder stories and think I’d be like them someday.
And here we are: 3 offsprings of the indien hacker movement: @phuctm97, @jackfriks and me.
I love seeing posts like this. I was a Grandmaster Starcraft 2 player for a while, and I still enjoy watching @Artosis cast Brood War games.
In my teens and 20's I would spend way too much time playing Starcraft and Civilization. Harvesting resources, building things, and expanding was super addictive to my brain - to an almost unhealthy degree.
Later I realized that entrepreneurship and business is the ultimate game. It scratches the same itch for me (resources, building, expanding), but you're actually contributing to humanity at the end of the day, which can be much more fulfilling.
Business is also much more positive sum than video games. In Starcraft, the other player has to lose for you to win. In business, there is competition, but in a growing market there can be multiple winners. And gains compound long term (it's a infinite game) instead of starting over each time.
Now days I prefer to watch pros play video games to unwind, instead of playing video games myself. But a quick game can still be fun here and there to unwind. By contrast, the game of business is played over many decades.
I was working outside of Starbucks at the mall, and this guy on his laptop next to me started chatting to me about AI coding, and it turned out to be the one and only @Steve_Yegge!
One of the best things coding agents can do for you is explain things:
- an undocumented codebase
- all the changes it just made
- an unfamiliar SDK or API
- a code execution path from start to finish
It's fast, accurate, and super helpful.
My favorite prompt: "Teach me how XYZ works. Use concentric circles of explanation that go from broad to specific."
Courtland Allen retweeted
Pieter Levels (@levelsio) and I sat down over a pint to talk about how he’s making $3m a year as a one-person company, what Europe can do to spur economic growth, and his experience as a digital nomad in over 150 cities across 40 countries.
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
00:37 Pieter’s resume
01:33 Trying to make money online as a 12 year old
02:43 Being one of the first YouTube creators
03:18 Who should indie hack
04:31 What Pieter hates about VC-backed businesses
07:51 Who is digital nomading for?
09:15 Learning from @patio11
10:17 125k tweets and the brand of @levelsio
10:59 Getting referrals from ChatGPT
11:43 What Pieter automates with AI
13:02 Investing and home country bias
15:05 Hacking thermostats
15:57 EU acceleration movement
18:34 Entrepreneurship in the EU
19:26 Pieter's reflections on Stripe’s API
21:21 Looking 5 years into the future
Someone help me understand the appeal of Claude Code, compared to Cursor:
- Doesn't have a real textbox, so it's hard to select/manipulate/copy text in your prompts as you write them
- Doesn't stream back AI responses, so you have to wait for them to finish before reading them
- Much harder to audit all the file changes it's made
- Can't go back up the tree to edit previous messages/responses
- Etc.
What am I missing?
Imagine the countless trillions of useful published works that could theoretically exist, but that were never written.
Because nobody was interested. Or nobody thought of it. Or the audience was too small, too niche.
But then the web came along, and gave everyone the power to publish. And in just a few decades, we've created ~10x more published content than all of human history before the internet.
Now imagine all the countless trillions of useful apps that could theoretically exist, but that have never been coded.
AI will do to software what the web did to media.
I'm at a point where "vibe coding" is much slower for me than normal coding. But my code is far better.
The only thing more astonishing than the number of nerds on HN who criticize agentic coding without ever having tried it themselves, is the fact that I am still astonished by it
A healthy environment gives you safety,
Safety enables ambition,
Ambition encourages learning,
Learning develops skills,
Skills produce wins,
Wins provide evidence,
Evidence fuels confidence,
Confidence becomes courage,
Courage creates opportunities,
Opportunities generate resources,
Resources upgrade environments.
If you think it's a problem that the world now has AI-generated software full of bugs and technical debt, I have something shocking to tell you about all the software we've been using for the past 50 years…
It's costing me roughly $10/hour to code with Claude 4, and it's 100% worth it
