> Building custom tools that work for only you is so under rated.

This is one of the top applications for LLM-based dev IMO. With things like aider / cline / cursor / windsurf / bolt it's looking like this will be a lot easier to scaffold small-scale projects that make sense for you and not necessarily turn into products. It suits single-dev / small teams for now, and that's OK.

This has been my experience as well. I find my much more likely to “build” it myself versus using something off the shelf because it’ll give me full control over the project.

A lot of the reasons I would pull in dependencies for are things I’m either not good at or not fast at writing and in most cases LLMs are good at picking up the slack.

It’s been a joy to write the core logic then have an LLM throw a web GUI frontend together for me so I can iterate faster.