Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
If you don’t mind, could you share the GitHub repository of your product?
I’m not very good at promotion or presentation — honestly, I’m below average.
So if I could see an example of how you do it, it would be incredibly helpful for me.
If you don't mind me asking — could you share which blogging platforms you recommend?
I live in Asia and only know local platforms, but since the user base is quite limited here, I'm looking for platforms where I can post in English and reach a broader audience.
They mean set up your own personal website and blog and get into the SEO game. Hint, it's actually not too difficult if you're writing a lot and also are able to write about something people want.
Besides the channel, there is a Discord community associated with the project which has ~2500 members at the moment, but other than that I sometimes post in the comment sections of various forums whenever I see someone is looking to solve a problem that the software could help with
Thank you very much for your response.
I didn’t get a notification yesterday and thought my question had been buried.
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You’re absolutely right — I need to shift from treating this as a hobby to treating it as real work.
But I’m still a beginner.
If you don’t mind, could you share some of the things you did to gather early user feedback?
Let me start by saying that, for me, this is the hardest part of any creative endeavour and I haven't figured it out. I'm mostly writing this to myself.
Second, this is a very deep aspect of the tech business, so I'm going to glide across the surface with some main points, but everything I say below is more properly addressed in essay format.
I would recommend not thinking of it as "work", but as a new, different part of your project. If you want to turn the project into a business, which is the lens I use to approach these things, then it will eventually _become_ work -- but right now it helps if you choose to feel that you're excited to find people who need your help.
Generally speaking, you want to get into the heads of a bunch of likely users, or ideally actual users, and then help them do what they're trying to do with your project. You do this by getting lots and lots and lots of user feedback, which necessarily starts with prospective users, and looking for commonalities.
1. Consider adding the feature the parent asks for, yes, and consider it STRONGLY. It's from someone who wants to use your project in a particular way that seems really cool. Then, ideally, follow-up with that poster and show that you've done it. Ask them to share it with interested people and see how they react.
2. In that response you say you're thinking of starting a community. DO THIS. It's hard to follow up on HN. You want a place where interested people can follow, and get excited about, your progress. Some creatives use Discord, a newsletter, X, etc. This is close to what people mean when they say "build in public".
3. The sub-reply asks for common templates. STRONGLY CONSIDER THIS. "Presets" that accomplish common goals quickly are extremely useful. Apple calls them something like "intelligent defaults". Mozart used instruments with "default" sounds to accomplish his goal: writing operas and symphonies.
For JavaFactory (great name) specifically, you want to put it in front of LOTS AND LOTS of Java developers -- and you're lucky: there are millions of them. "Fish where the fish are" -- find out where they hang out and go hang out with them. Search for people talking about, off the top of my head, why they wish IntelliJ was more like Cursor or something, and show them what you've done. Talk about what you're doing and ask for feedback. Generally give feedback a higher weight than your own ideas, but filter it against a vision of what you're trying to actually accomplish -- don't just build what people ask for, adjust your project to accomplish their goal and eliminate their complaint. Try to get them to join your community, or newsletter, etc. -- but always, ideally, use the software.
This is a very strange way for lots of people to think, but you are looking for signal in a lot of noise. You just have to keep looking and refining and showing and demoing and pivoting and adding and subtracting, always in front of an audience, until they start liking what you're doing. Then try to get them to join your community, or newsletter, etc. -- but always, ideally, use the software.
THEN
Once you know who your typical user is and what value they get from your project, and this should be very specific and well-defined, THEN you find out where THOSE people are and "fish where the fish are" again, much more specifically and with a more targeted message. At this point maybe you own the fishing pond (your community, or newsletter, etc.).
NOW you can look at ad spend and CAC-to-LTV ratios and growth metrics and VC and things.
But all of the above is different for every founder/product/market/etc. You just have to figure it out the hard way.
The way capitalism works is you have to provide lots of people something that they need but don't know how to get. This means new things are ALWAYS found in places no one is looking yet. The fact that you're a beginner is a huge advantage because you have the flexibility of approach to try EVERYTHING, which you should do, and find new ways that work.
Yes, this is a bit of a grind, but done properly it's really creative and fun.
I think IntelliJ is a great tool on its own.
Recently, they even added a feature that auto-injects dependencies when you declare them as private final — super convenient.
I can’t help but wonder if the folks at JetBrains are starting to feel a bit of pressure from tools like Cursor or Windsurf
1. Im sorry. i it was typo on path, i fixed it so you can see now.
2. from now, i only allow to use gpt-4o, because the requests involve relatively long context windows, which require high-quality reasoning.
Only recent high-performance models like GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet are capable of reducing the manual workload for this kind of task.
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but still, if user want to use other models , i can make adapter features for various models
That's right. Unfortunately, the system currently forces the use of GPT-4o.
To be honest, I didn’t realize that model selection would be such an important point for users.
I believed that choosing a high-quality model with strong reasoning capabilities was part of the service’s value proposition.
But lately, more users — including yourself — have been asking for support for other models like Claude Sonnet or LLaMA.
I’m now seriously considering adding an adapter feature.
Thank you for your feedback — I really appreciate it.
I can't speak for other people but I regularly work with code that is not owned by my organisation and getting approval to send it out to some remote, largely unaccountable, corporation is likely to be impossible under the conditions which we operate.
Together with the CEO I've also decided that we do not do this with our own code, it stays on machines we control until someone pays for some artifact we'd like to license.
I'm well aware that many other organisations take a different position and push out basically everything they work on to SaaS LLM:s, in my experience defending it with something about so called productivity and something about some contract clause about the SaaS pinky promising to not straight up take the code. But nothing stops them from running hidden queries against it with their in-house models parallel with providing their main service, and sift out a lot of trade secrets and other goodies from it.
It's also likely these SaaS corporations can benchmark and otherwise profile individual developers, information that would be very valuable to e.g. recruiting agencies.
And I work for an organization that does everything they can think of to make it virtually impossible for anyone to leak code outside, but is now mandating Copilot use to the point of including it in personal performance goals.
Sounds like it might be a good idea to scout for a new gig. When management is acting incoherently it usually doesn't take long for employee churn to pick up.
If you can tell, how is that Copilot performance measured?
I don't know how they measure it, but I assume they have some management dashboard they can view. The requirement is exposed to us in multiple performance objectives with phrases about x% of team making active use of gen ai, use gen ai to increase velocity y%, automate z% of tasks with gen ai, and so on.
Your point is valid.
In real-world work, tests should focus on parts that are difficult to verify, and if everything passes on the first try, it's often a sign that something deserves a closer look.
That said, what I wanted to highlight in the example was a contrast — tools like Cursor and other general-purpose models often fail to even generate simple tests correctly, or can't produce tests that pass.
So the goal was to show the difference in reliability.
The requests involve relatively long context windows, which require high-quality reasoning.
Only recent high-performance models like GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet are capable of reducing the manual workload for this kind of task.
I’m not very good at promotion or presentation — honestly, I’m below average. So if I could see an example of how you do it, it would be incredibly helpful for me.