side projects

I fixed two bugs in my own writing-automation system this week — an image retriever that returned zero images, and a dedup logic that couldn't tell facts from opinions apart. The real question was never whether it was worth it. It was whether I was willing to pay for it.

The only niches left for people like us are the ones big companies did the math on and declined. Your edge isn't being better than them, it's being willing to do the grunt work they won't. AI just made it cheaper for them to copy a small feature, so it's worth re-measuring that line.

My automated trading system can stop me from placing a manual order. It can't stop me from doing the math in my head — and that quiet arithmetic is what actually breaks the system.

Half a year into automating my WeChat newsletter as a side project, the books still don't balance. But tweaking an agent prompt past 11pm one Sunday, I realized what I'm actually getting out of it isn't quite money.

A late-night parameter change on my own automated prediction system taught me that when a return curve looks tempting, what actually matters isn't the average return — it's whether you can survive the worst single month.

Don't rush to package your side-project system into something anyone can use. Sell one custom job first, and let the person who actually pays validate what you built.