Adam Thede

Picking a dev shop shouldn’t leave the success of your startup to chance. But let’s be real: one wrong hire and you’re stuck: → Scope creep burning $50k/month while they "figure it out"… → Missed deadlines pushing your launch into next year… → "Scalable" code that faceplants at 1,000 users… You’re not crazy... 74% of startups blow their dev budget 2X–3X over (thanks, Gartner). Why? Most shops: ❌ Stuff your MVP with "nice-to-haves" (that users ignore). ❌ Lock you into tech that can’t grow with you. ❌ Smother you in jargon while your cash evaporates. We got tired of the BS. So we built a dev shop for founders, by founders: Tight-Fisted MVP Sprints Ship in 90 days with ONLY what makes you money. Live performance dashboards → see exactly how healthy your tech is. Skin-in-the-Game Pricing... Fixed monthly fees. Zero surprise invoices. We don’t "exit" ’til you’re winning. Why this works when others flop: While rivals drown in tech debt, you’ll: → Deploy 3X faster (clean code ≠ rocket science). → Pivot over coffee – not corporate Zoom marathons. → Scale profitably while others beg for "just 6 more weeks!" Stop rolling dice with your company. 👉 "DM" us for a free tech autopsy : We’ll dissect your stack + show you 3 cash leaks bleeding you dry. PS: Choose the perfect dev partner and watch your startup soar. #NoMoreTechRegrets #MVPThatDoesntSuck #RealTalkDevs #SaaSFounders #ScaleWithoutTears #DevShopRehab #StartupTruths

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Don't believe the BS that you can use Claude Code for free. Ollama recently made their API compatible with Claude Code. Many creators quickly jumped on the opportunity to farm engagement with the hook: "You can now use Claude Code for free!" My thought? Claude Code without Opus 4.5 is not Claude Code. Period. But this is exciting news. Not because I can use Claude Code for free, but because I see an opportunity to optimize costs by delegating easier tasks to local LLMs. The key question is: what tasks can local LLMs handle? I tested out 7 local LLMs. In this post, I will explain the BS and share my 1st experiment. -- Why the BS? Claude Code has been praised as one of the best AI tools by its users, not only for coding but for many other tasks. But the price feels steep to many. The $20/month plan is not enough for any serious work. You need to at least subscribe to Max 5x ($100/month). Many heavy users, including me, subscribe to Max 20x ($200/month). It’s a steal. But still, many were eager to try it but aren't ready to pay. Ollama's recent announcement means you can buy a Mac, a Strix Halo, or a GPU and use Claude Code for "free" with local LLMs. It’s appealing, as it is a one-time investment, and you can use the machine for other purposes. Creators are leveraging this opportunity to farm engagement. But the reality? Claude Code without Opus 4.5 is not the same Claude Code we praised. Local LLMs are far less intelligent. -- But for those who understand the difference, we see an opportunity to optimize costs by delegating some easier tasks to local LLMs. I'm interested in finding out what tasks local LLMs can handle. This is my typical flow when using Claude Code. This is for coding, but I have similar flows for marketing and content creation. 1. Research and planning 2. Create PRD and implementation plan 3. Break plan into bite-sized tasks 4. Implement + review with reflection pattern 5. Final review with agents 6. Final review and QA by me Based on my quick tests, we can forget about asking local LLMs to do research and planning. All of them failed at a simple instruction: "Visit https://learnparrot.ai/ and tell me about the website." So, I think the most viable use cases would only be (4) — implementation + review loops. While it looks like a very narrow use case, it is where we burn a lot of tokens. So I think it is worth a try. The main selection criteria for this will be instruction-following capability. One very common task is to refer to code samples or templates to code a new feature or page. This is a good test of instruction-following. So, I crafted my first test: - Used Opus to create HTML that I can screenshot as a LinkedIn carousel to display info for each model. - Turned one of the pages into a template and deleted the rest. - Asked each LLM to refer to the template to code its own page, given its specs. Swipe the carousel to see the results. Who would you hire? #LocalLLM #ClaudeCode #VibeCoding

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Claude Code is helping government too. I was amazed to hear from two software engineers inside government IT departments last week: - "Claude Code makes my 20 engineers feel like 200" and - "A project that used to take 1 month took just 1 weekend with Claude Code." Government software engineers build mission-critical systems affecting millions of residents, yet they're stretched thin maintaining legacy systems. Empowering them means better public services built in-house. Safe AI models and responsible deployment also matter even more here given the high stakes of government production code.

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A team member messaged me after a 4-hour call fixing dev issues. "I can't believe you were on that call." We have 100+ people at Genflow. I run a $100M agency. And I was right there debugging code with the team. It hit me how wrong most people get leadership. Everyone thinks being CEO means strategy sessions and vision boards. Wrong. Being CEO means being the captain who's still on the field. You show people how it's done by doing it alongside them. Not above them. The idea that you'll build a business and just work on "high-level stuff" while everyone else executes? That's not how you scale. You scale by staying close to the work. Understanding the actual problems. Building alongside your team. After 9 years of doing this, I've learned: The best CEOs aren't in corner offices. They're in the trenches when things break. They know the product inside out. They can still do the work if needed. Your team doesn't follow titles. They follow leaders who roll up their sleeves. What kind of leader are you trying to be?

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