Indie dev's anti-slop lessons for building with AI: solve your own pain, ship one thing you'll use daily
chaseleantj · x · 2026-10-20
Developer chaseleantj shares lessons on building with AI without producing slop:
- Don't tokenmax.
- Develop taste for problems: start from your own daily annoyances — keep a notebook for a week and you'll have 10 solid ideas (his examples: local photo search app, distraction-free personalized language learning, a tool to test whether Claude skills actually work, weekly meal-to-grocery planner, local personal knowledge base agent).
- Aggressively narrow scope: since you can build anything now, it's easy to get sidetracked; keep asking why you're building the app.
- Do one thing really well: optimize for how many of your last 10 AI-built projects you still use every day.
- Don't burn time scrolling X for ideas.
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