Wednesday, May 20th, 2026
Last weekend I turned 31, and also marks six years since starting this site - time flies! I spent it hiking around some of the stunning coasts in Pembrokeshire.
The past week working on Zoneless has been more laying the groundwork to build an open-source clone of Stripe checkout.
So far, I have ticked off products and prices, and now have a working clone of Stripe's product catalogue.
One thing I've noticed is, when I built v1 of Zoneless, I leaned on AI a lot to build initial big portions of the project.
Now, I don't enjoy doing that so much - and find letting a coding agent loose to make big sweeping codebase changes only leads to confusion + slowness down the line.
I'm more efficient when I understand a codebase fully in my head - and don't enjoy the idea of being pinned into a corner to pay Cursor $5 every time I need to make a small change.
So I'm happy to trade speed for understanding, as I think I'll work better long-term.
As the Navy SEALs say: Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast.
