Be your own technical founder
Tips from a career startup software engineer on how to vibe code real platforms
Hi, I’m Nate. I’m a career startup software engineer, and I’ve been involved in 0 to 1 and early stage software projects for a decade now. I wrote and helped contribute to many projects before the advent of AI and many projects after.
1. Want to build? I think you can do it.
There’s a lot of people arguing about if “not previously technical” people can build on their own now, or if the Lovables and Replits of the world are just a mess waiting to happen. I think both are true (don’t love the previously mentioned but we’ll get to that). You can do this, but people don’t hire Senior Engineers because they can beep boop code onto a screen, it’s because of what they’ve seen and what their experience allows them to avoid effortlessly. Luckily, I can help you with that.
2. What are we going to cover?
None of us really need to “write” code anymore, but creating code in general has all of the same potholes it used to. So while LLMs have opened the doors of programming to you, you still need to know what a pothole looks like. Luckily it’s as easy as someone saying “Hey, look out for that pothole”. Software patterns, systems architecture, security, scalability, devops, databases, we’ll try to cover it all, and like the name suggests, I’ll leave you with the prompts that will help you find your way.
3. This blog will save you real money (like a lot).
In recent years I have been advising a lot on software projects, and as fate would have it, the majority of the 100k+ in fees that have been paid to me have been spent by me helping them avoid or correct the same common issues over and over again. Not only is it my personal goal to save you as much time and money as possible, but I will also save you or make you actual money through little known tips, tricks, or like, just actual links to free money.
So there you have it. I think you should go build your crazy ideas, and you should tell the people saying you can’t to shove it. But AI can’t currently save you from all the things waiting to make you have a bad day, so maybe go build recklessly, but maybe also read this newsletter just in case.
Love,
Nate