Solo dev shipping six side projects, my real bottleneck is taste not code

I run six side projects alone. Two pay rent, four are experiments. Last quarter I tracked where my hours actually went using Toggl: 11% writing code, 9% prompting agents, 38% reviewing what agents produced, the rest on support, billing, and deciding what to build next. The productivity story everyone tells is that solo devs now ship like a team of five. Partially true. I ship roughly 3x the features I did in 2024. But my churn went up too, because I shipped two features users actively disliked. Both were ones I let an agent design end-to-end while I rubber-stamped the PR. The skill that matters is not prompting. It is knowing which 20% of generated output deserves real attention, and being willing to throw away an afternoon of working code because the shape is wrong. I now force myself to write the first version of any user-facing flow by hand, then let agents extend it. The hand-written seed seems to constrain the agent toward something I actually want.

▲ 44·yara_najjar·2mo

11 comments

0lucia_paz_dev·2mo

Same shape on my side, except the bottleneck is knowing which draft is actually worth sending. I can generate six versions of a landing page in an afternoon now, but picking the one that won't embarrass me in front of a client still takes the same two hours it always did. Curious how you're deciding which of the six projects to kill, since that's where I keep stalling.

0wei.zhang·2mo

Same pattern on my end since I started using LLMs for drafts. I can produce four blog posts in the time one used to take, but deciding which angle is actually worth publishing has become the slow part, and I don't think any tool fixes that for you.

0joaqd·2mo

Same pattern here running a 4-person seed stage team. The models will spit out five plausible auth flows or landing pages in an hour, and the actual work is having an opinion about which one is right for the user we're chasing. The bottleneck moved from typing to judgment, and judgment doesn't parallelize.

0priyaNair·2mo

Six projects with one taste filter sounds like the actual problem. I've been hand-rolling agent stuff for a year and the velocity gain just shifted the bottleneck to deciding which half-working thing is worth finishing. Curious how you triage which of the six survives past week two.

0arjunsharma_ml·1mo

Same boat after my fourth project. The code is cheap now, but figuring out which of the six is actually worth pushing past launch week is where I keep stalling. How are you deciding what to kill?

0noah_anderson·1mo

Same pattern on my side, though my "taste" problem is figuring out which pipelines are worth building at all. I can scaffold a dbt model and Airflow DAG in an afternoon now, but I've shipped two internal dashboards in the last quarter that nobody opens. Curious how you decide which of the six to actually keep maintaining.

0noah_anderson·1mo

Six projects sounds like the bottleneck is also distribution, not just taste. Across my client roster the ones who ship constantly but can't tell which idea deserves a second month are usually the ones who never set a kill criterion up front. What's your rule for cutting a project?

0sam_okafor·1mo

Curious how you're actually developing taste though. I can ship faster too but I still can't tell if what I'm building is any good, and shipping more bad things doesn't seem to fix that.

0AishaKapoor·1mo

Six shipped projects in what timeframe, and how many have more than a handful of weekly actives? In my experience the "taste" bottleneck shows up much later, after you've had to support something for a year and watch which decisions actually hurt.

0priyaNair·1mo

Same boat. Shipped four micro-SaaS last year using Cursor plus Supabase, and three flopped because the landing pages looked like 2014 Bootstrap. Hired a designer off Contra for $800 to redo just the hero and pricing on the survivor, and signups went from 12 a week to 47. Code was never the moat.

0linh_nguyen·1mo

Watched our design lead kill three of my "ready to ship" features last quarter because the flows felt off, even though every acceptance criterion was green. Shipping six things means six chances to learn what good looks like, which is the part no tool gives you.