Traditional Development’s Last Stand: The $20 Tools Making $20,000 Builds Obsolete

Hi Friends,

So, last week, after demoing how to ship an idea with Bolt in 90 minutes and showing you peak AI at prototyping, I could have stopped.

I should have stopped.

But of course I didn’t.

I downloaded Windsurf, an agentic IDE¹, used up all my free credits, and subscribed for the Pro plan. 🙃

This is why I’ve spent most of my early morning hours building not one but two prototypes simultaneously. But I’m sure the results and my findings won’t disappoint you.

Why it Matters

Before you close this email, expecting a sales pitch for my half-baked AI prototypes…

I want you to understand that I built these alone in hours.

So, let’s see what you can do with ~$20 today.

First is a medication tracker app, which was an idea that someone else suggested after showing them the symptom tracker app. Here’s a short demo:

Now, the other thing I’m super excited about is onetaskx.com. I know—it’s a To-Do list app—so original, but it has a twist!

The Today list allows you to have only one task. This is ideal for parents like me who have a few hours to work in the dark every morning before the family wakes up.

I used to write a single sticky note each evening and put it on my keyboard so that the next morning, I would know what to do. However, I also love keeping my desk clean, so this is a better alternative.

It’s a PWA, and for now, it just uses IndexDB, so everything is on your computer.

No sign-up is needed. You can install and run it as a native app. It’s my favorite To-Do app now.

This app also has the backend done and client-side encryption, but I’ve run out of my free Supabase projects, so that part has to wait.

But now you’re asking…

How does it affect me?

I won’t hide the obvious conclusion:

No agency will build any of this for $20.

Sure, there are challenges. Every time I try to amaze my wife with these tools, I go like:

So you literally just type into this box what you want to see. Let me show you…

Then Cursor or Windsurf forgets to close a <>, and it’s React errors all over the place–you can tell she’s not impressed.

But if you know a little bit of React, JavaScript, or whatever your Jam is, the limit to what you can build alone without needing to hire has just increased by 10x.

Action Items

If you’re a freelancer or someone just starting, you probably already have a hard time, but here’s what I’d do:

1. Don’t ignore AI-driven development, it’s happening.

2. Learn DSA basics very well (in the next post, I’ll talk about more AI fails I’ve run into as I was working on some path traversal algorithms)

3. Live and breathe agentic IDEs. If you’re short on money, anything that has an LLM support. Get used to it.

4. Learn how to break up problems into smaller sub-problems (in the next newsletter, I’ll talk about what happens when you miss this).

5. Learn to prompt precisely. Yeah, prompt engineering is a thing, here we go.

I know this was a bit different format than you’re used to, but things are happening so fast… See you next week with more LLM coding stuff from the trenches.

📰 Weekly shoutout

1. How (not to) fail a coding interview by

   Franco Fernando

2. 4 Challenges of Distributed Systems - And Possible Solutions by

   Saurabh Dashora

3. Lifelong Learning: 88+ Resources I Don't Regret as a Senior Software Engineer by

   Petar Ivanov

📣 Share

There’s no easier way to help this newsletter grow than by sharing it with the world. If you liked it, found something helpful, or you know someone who knows someone to whom this could be helpful, share it:

🏆 Subscribe

Actually, there’s one easier thing you can do to grow and help grow: subscribe to this newsletter. I’ll keep putting in the work and distilling what I learn/learned as a software engineer/consultant. Simply sign up here:

1. An agentic IDE uses AI to autonomously assist in coding, making decisions and taking actions independently. Non-agentic IDEs are traditional tools requiring explicit user instructions for each task.