Coleton Gorecke

Self Taught Software Engineer. I talk about life, software engineering, productivity, and growing your own solo software business. Building. Writing. Creating.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

https://t.co/8RaCplhNWh

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

If you don't own the product, you are the product.

As long as someone else owns your time, or the thing you pour your hours into, they get to benefit the most from you. Your leverage is your willingness to stay late and accept all the work you're given.

Ownership flips the whole equation. The only thing I ever controlled was how many hours I worked.

Start your own product.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

There are two camps of engineers right now.

Camp one: gifted, talented, but never starts their own thing.

Camp two: builds constantly, ambitious, skilled, but never grows any of it into something worth real money.

I'm firmly planted in camp two. I had a kid at 18, worked seven days a week in my early twenties, and treated every attempt like a side hustle.

The fix isn't more skills. It's intent. What are you in?

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

https://t.co/TlBrXtEy1R

[Intent App @intentappios]

Everything feels urgent. Most of it isn't.

Intent sorts what matters from what's merely loud, then gives today to three things.

Join the free beta waitlist: https://t.co/NTmGBM99MW

#productivity #eisenhowermatrix #todolist

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Feeling behind isn't a signal to learn more. It's what feeds the juggling. The way out is one shipped thing in front of one stranger.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Engineers feel behind because the feed makes it look like everyone's ahead.

That's a bubble. Most people have no idea any of this is happening, and they don't care. They're still the ones who will pay for the thing instead of building it.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

The first one pays in momentum, not money. Build the bad app. It's the only way to earn the good one.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Your first app is supposed to suck, and that's the tuition for the good one.

I'd keep building and polishing instead of shipping because building felt like progress and shipping felt like standing on stage waiting to see if anyone claps.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

The reason AI coding scares us isn't really about losing the job. It's that a lot of who we are is welded to what we do.

I felt it too. For months I asked myself if I was ever actually good at this, or if I'd just been fast.

Here's the truth I landed on: the identity was never "the one who writes the code." It was "the one who knows what's worth building."

That doesn't go away. It just stops hiding behind syntax.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Now AI hands me the same out through a different door. I let the agent pick, defer the deciding, and pretend I'm still the one building.

The decision is the product. When I hand that over, I'm not even the one abandoning the repo anymore.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

I kill projects before the market can. Not ready, not polished, a competitor already did it better. I decide it's dead so I never have to find out.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Vibe-coding is typing prompts and praying. Vibe-engineering is planning, then checking the thing against your plan.

The first makes you a typist. The second keeps you the decider.

When the industry said "vibe-coding," I held firm on "vibe-engineering."

The difference: whether the architecture and the decisions live in your head or in the model's.

Vibe-code and you ship fast and learn nothing. Vibe-engineer and you get better every week.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

I stopped starting less. I got to work on the boring last 20% instead of running to the next shiny thing.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

AI made starting a new project cheap, and that turned my problem from starting into finishing.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

A new idea used to cost me a weekend. Now it costs twenty minutes. The second a project got boring, nothing slowed me down enough to make me stay. The fee for walking away dropped to zero.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

@shlokbuilds Yup! Gotta keep the human in there some where.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Everyone thinks the hard part of AI coding is prompting.

It's not. Prompts are the easy part.

The hard part is making decisions before the agent runs, then checking its work honestly after.

Deciding what to build. What done means. Whether the diagram matches the plan and the tests prove the behavior.

That's not delegation. That's the same job you always had, minus the typing.

The engineers who get promoted treat it that way.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

So I gave myself a rule: ship one small app before I let myself start another. Not pick one interest forever. One at a time, all the way through.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

The first 80% of a project is fun. The last 20% is taxes, designs, updates, and legal docs, and right on schedule a new idea shows up looking like relief.

I'd chase it and never take the shot. Fifteen repos, three years, and a pile of things that never met a customer.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

All of it just to discover the thing my job was actually testing was whether I could decide what to build and know when it was done.

The code was always the mechanism. The judgment was the skill.

That skill didn't get replaced by AI. It got exposed.

[Coleton Gorecke @coletoncodes]

Writing code used to be my whole identity. Then I realized it was never the point.

I spent years learning frameworks, being the person who could type the answer fast.