I would say that working as a programmer in a corporate environment is a bit similar to being paid to be a novel writer by people who don't know how to read, but absolutely want to tell you how to do your job properly.

IMO you don’t need to build a full app or company. You could just build a series of niche sites or properties. If your code solves a specific pain point really well, wrap it in a simple front end or paid API and let people use it.

Some possible ideas:

Micro SaaS: Turn it into a one-page tool (log parser, file cleaner, PDF transformer) with Stripe and add rate limits. People pay for simplicity.

Paid API: Use RapidAPI or Plain.com to expose it. Charge per hit or via metered billing. Maybe even a slackbot for some of these would make sense.

Productized utility: Sell it as a $49/month “done-for-you” service to whatever niche audience would benefit (dev teams, SEO people, lawyers, etc).

Digital bundle: If it’s CLI or script-based, package it up with a guide or demo on YouTube and sell on Gumroad.

You’re not necessarily building a startup, and that’s fine! just something useful enough for strangers to pay for which is more than enough

Be good at something and help someone with that.

If you're not good yet, do it for free first until you get good, cause it will take you awhile to debug and troubleshoot and work out the kinks of what you're trying to do.

Then do it for cheap until you're an expert. You have little to no overheard a the beginning (other than time invested), so you can do it cheaper than anyone else. Think of it like you're taking a 50% pay cut: 50% is paid to you now, and the other 50% that you don't get now is in the form of experience because you got to do a job now that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to do, because 100% cost to them would be too much. Then that 50% comes back to you in 5 years, because now you have one more tool in your toolbelt. The next time someone needs help with that, it will take you 50% less time (or probably more like 80%).

People value their time, but they won't pay for something that saves them 10 or 20 minutes, especially if it just takes a quick Google to solve (although you'd be surprised how many people can't do a simple Google to solve a problem. Maybe start there?)

Become so good that you save them an hour, or 3, then maybe half a day, or a few days.

Then charge an equivalent rate for the amount of time or hassle you've saved them.

I learned a great piece of wisdom from some random soul on Hacker News that I'll never be able to thank: increase your rate with each new client, until you start getting push back. Then you'll know your worth, or at least the appropriate range. I went from $25/hour when I first started, to $175/hour now. It took 10 years, but now the $175 is a bargain for most people, because I'm no longer saving them an hour or two here and there; I'm the difference between their business working or not.

I do neither. No blogging, barebones site (that's honestly not very professional). I've only ever had one lead from my website's contact form, because they saw my forum response on another site.

I find that the best use of time is practicing and being a professional with your existing clients, rather than appearing to be a professional to would-be clients. Your existing clients will then send all the work you could want your way.

I use o1, mainly to

- write well-defined and self-contained bash, python, powershell scripts to automate tasks

- give it an error (often from a build tool) and ask it to help fix it. Sometimes it figures it out, but if not then it gives me ideas, and sometimes this allows me to figure it out myself

- ask it how to achieve things at a high level (if I’m unfamiliar with a tool or problem domain). Sometimes this is to validate what I was already planning to do or find a better way to achieve the desired result (I tend to work solo on projects)

- text or code transformations

- writing regular expressions

- I use copilot to improve code writing speed. Sometimes it gets things wrong but overall I find it does speed things up, particularly for repetitive tasks (e.g switch statements with similar cases)