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Welcome to Zero to SaaS. I’m Lakshmi — Principal SRE by day, shipping SaaS products on the side using AI coding tools.

This newsletter is for indie devs stuck between ideas and launches. What actually works when you’re building solo, from someone doing it in the trenches.

Claude Code Deep Dives

My most in-depth posts. If you use Claude Code (or want to), this is the cluster:

Getting Started:

I Spent Weeks Confused About Claude Code’s 5 Concepts — The mental model that finally clicked
Claude Code Hooks — The feature you’re ignoring
Stop Making Claude Code Guess — The escape hatch from the box
What Chinese Factories Taught Me About Prompting Claude Code — Anything you don’t specify will be done at minimum cost

Going Deeper:

Skills vs Slash Commands — One works, one’s a prayer
The Control Freak’s Guide to Letting Agents Explore — Why your 50-line slash commands keep breaking
Your MCP Servers Are Eating Your Context — Mine were too. Then I found this.
Why Your MCP Server Will Die in Obscurity — The reason Claude ignores your MCP server has nothing to do with your code
Claude Code Has Been Navigating Your Codebase Like a Tourist With No Map — Your IDE solved this in 2016. Here’s the fix for your agent.
While You Panic About AI Taking Jobs, I Built $200/Mo Tools - I eliminated $200/month in AI subscriptions by building Claude Code skills

Production Lessons:

Claude Code Is Incredible. It Also Almost Shipped 8 Production Bombs Last Week. — What 15 years of production scars are still good for
What Happens When You Let 6 AI Agents Write Code at the Same Time — A field report from Gas Town
Why I’m Building an Agent Orchestrator — Or: How I learned to stop tab-switching

Vibe Coding

The art of shipping fast with AI — and the pitfalls:

The Good:

I Built 2 SaaS Products Vibe Coding — The system that made it work
How Indie Devs Can Vibe Code Fast Without Sinking Their Own Ship — The quiet tension between vibe and discipline
A Saner Way to Use AI for Coding — TDD was built for the AI age

The Bad:

Will Vibe Coding Replace Developers? COBOL Already Tried. — The same people who said COBOL would kill devs are now saying AI will
The Invisible Tax You Pay When You Vibe Code — Comprehension debt is real, and it’s compounding
I Watched AI Generate a Perfect Todo App in 3 Minutes. Then I Spent 3 Days Fixing It. — The 8 questions to ask before you start
AI Made Me Faster at Procrastinating — A painfully honest look at how I used cutting-edge tools to avoid shipping real work

The Fix:

How to Secure Your Vibe-Coded Project — Before it secures you
Fix Your Vibe-Coded Codebase — The checklist your AI skipped

Indie SaaS Stack

Practical lessons from building products with a day job:

Starting Out:

The SaaS Stack I’d Use If Starting Today (2026 Edition) — A faster way to build
The $30/Year Stack for Launching Small Bets — Minimum viable infrastructure
I Stopped Buying SaaS Boilerplates — What I buy instead
Be Prepared to Throw Away Your Code — The best architecture might be the one you’re willing to throw away

Shipping:

I Found a Business Idea and Shipped It in One Claude Code Session — Reddit thread to live product in under an hour
Don’t Write a CD Pipeline Yet — If you’ve never deployed by hand, you don’t deserve automation
Why Your SaaS Needs a Docker Compose Setup — Even if you’re just one person

Pricing & Business:

The Real SaaS Moat AI Can’t Replicate — What survives when AI can build anything
Stop Forcing Subscriptions on Your SaaS — Sometimes selling once makes more sense
You’re Making Your SaaS Harder Than It Needs to Be — The boring stack that lets you ship and sleep
The Hidden Tax Slowing Down Indie SaaS Builders — Ship faster by thinking smaller

Infrastructure for Indie Devs

You don’t need the same cloud as Amazon:

AWS Is Overrated — Indie devs don’t need the same cloud as Amazon
I Spent Years on Kubernetes. Now I’m Betting Against It. — Solo devs don’t need complexity
When DIY Beats Managed Kubernetes — Sometimes rolling your own wins
Nomad vs Kubernetes — A practical comparison

Security & Production

The stuff that keeps your SaaS alive at 2am:

I Found a Cryptominer in My Client’s Production Cluster — A CVSS 10.0 incident and how Claude Code found the attacker
Your Redis Is Probably Naked Right Now — A solo dev security horror story
Your SaaS Will Break — Here’s How to See It Coming — What many founders realize only after their first outage
Your Python Web App Is a Memory Hog — Practical fixes for RAM issues

AI & The Future of Dev Work

Philosophy, hot takes, and what’s actually changing:

What’s Dying:

Software Engineering Is Dead, or Is It? — The boring stuff was load-bearing all along
90% of Programming Skills Just Got Commoditized — What’s still worth learning
Your Code Quality Doesn’t Matter Anymore — And it never did
Congratulations, You’ve Been Promoted to Code Janitor — What we traded for velocity

What Survives:

The Real Skill AI Won’t Replace — Someone has to clean up after the AI
The Indie Dev Edge in the Age of AI — AI can write a thousand lines in seconds. Too bad it can’t read them for you.
What Every Indie Dev Should Master Before Asking AI to Build — How to stay in control
The AI Subsidy Window Developers Aren’t Talking About — Big tech is burning billions to subsidize your AI compute. Here’s how long this window lasts.

The Paradoxes:

The AI Productivity Paradox — Why I’m working more than ever
The Junior Dev Paradox — We’re speed-running past the tutorial
Why Company AI Bans Will Backfire (The Napster Lesson) — Your company’s AI ban is in the RIAA lawsuit phase. Here’s what comes next.

SRE Life

When the day job leaks into the newsletter:

How to Escape the SRE Meeting-Industrial Complex — How to reclaim your brain from the meeting-industrial complex
5 Ways to Survive an Inherited Codebase — The unglamorous reality of ops work
Did We Overthink Frontend? — Before the npm abyss

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Zero to SaaS