Last July I hit my limit on Cursor. Literally. The free tier ran out and it told me I couldn't use it anymore for a month.

So I switched to Copilot. Except I didn't know how it worked. I didn't know I needed to pay $10 a month just to use it without also paying for the models underneath it. I didn't know what models even were, not really.

I was just a guy in Eastern Kentucky trying to build an app. No CS degree. No team. No funding. No idea what I was doing.

This was before Claude Code existed. Before every AI company had a coding agent. Before any of this was normal. I was copying code out of ChatGPT, pasting it into VS Code, asking Claude questions in another tab, and manually trying to stitch it together. It was slow and painful and I kept hitting walls I didn't know how to climb.

So I decided to build my own coding assistant.…