Create Opinionated or Disappear
When functionality becomes a commodity, only opinions survive
I ended 2025 with a quite dramatic post about how the new MiCA regulations killed the business, and why I open-sourced the app I built for the last six years. It would likely have been my lowest point in life if not the fact that one special person said “yes” around the same time.
I’m not a whiny person. Not only did I promise my long-term subscribers (who lost the service) to find a solution, but there was a path forward discussed already before: making the app self-hosted, and offering it as a self-managed solution where users manage the database and trades themselves, and I offer only the hosting. There was only one problem: saying it’s a lot of work was an understatement.
Two Years in a Month
I had no funds to hire a developer anymore, and I’m not a great coder myself. However, during over six years I collected a lot of domain-specific knowledge around my project architecture and technology stack. I opened Claude Code and started working on tasks I would have been too shy to touch a few weeks earlier.
What I realized pretty quickly is that even after using AI-assisted coding for the last 3 years, I was significantly behind what AI can actually do now. Claude can now log in to the server, access all available APIs, read logs… and basically solve any problem in minutes. Suddenly the whole picture changed completely:
In a month, working alone, I finished the roadmap for the next 1-2 years.
For many of you, it may sound like a crazy statement, so let me give you an example: a single exchange implementation, 3 months ago, was taking about a week, and could maybe be closed in 3 days with a good flow and focus.
Claude implemented six exchanges, a month of human labor, in 43 minutes.
The most disturbing observation was that most of the time, AI doesn’t do anything not because it can’t, but because I don’t know yet what it should do next. I need to think first, and that takes time. For the first time since I started working with computers in 1990, what slows the work is… me. I am the slowest part of the system.
What is Work?
If you think about it, most of the work during our history has been repetitive mechanical tasks: collecting crop, putting boxes on the factory line, filling cells in Excel. What is clear now is that all repetitive tasks will be automated. Yes, all of them.
In the middle of last year, the idea was that we’ll be more productive with a team of AI agents assisting us. You’ll be like a project manager with your own team.
Guess what: AI is better also at managing such a team.
I seriously started to think about what my job now really is. I spend a big part of the day thinking about what should be done, but usually it comes down to a bigger story behind it: What is the meaning of this feature? Why is it important?
The best new definition of work I found for myself is creating the story of the product. Why does it exist? Why should anybody care? Why should you use it?
What if our job from now on is mainly to provide meaning to what has to be done?
The Era of Opinionated
Deltabadger uses Rails. It’s an amazing piece of code from 37signals they like to call a “highly opinionated web framework.” It means it doesn’t simply do the job. It proposes a specific philosophy and approach to the problem. Rails tells you: “Others are doing things wrong. I think this is how your app should be done.”
When I started to think about how to explain open-sourced Deltabadger as a product, I realized that adding “opinionated” to the description does a lot of heavy lifting. This is not a “DCA bot for crypto” — it expresses my opinions, beliefs, and personal investing and life philosophy. The features, the design, the business model — all reflect it.
My opinion is that:
white collar jobs will disappear before blue collar jobs
the distance between earners and owners will increase
society is better when individuals own capital
modern monetary policy is broken
most people shouldn’t trade
most people should invest
switching from earning to owning is the best hedge against the disruption coming
…and this is Deltabadger. Not just DCA functionality.
Any functionality is now just a commodity: it’s already possible to ask a chat “write me a DCA bot for Binance” and get whatever features you want if you can express them clearly. In software, the only space that’s left is for products with a good story, good design, a unique approach that is something more than an average from a training data. This is the value added now.
So, Wait… Deltabadger is Back?
Yes, the service is back. The software itself is now open-source. The service, on the other hand, becomes an official hosting to run it. We call it Deltabadger Cloud.
Since every user now runs a separate server, you can create multiple accounts not only for yourself, but also for your close ones. It supports 10 exchanges already, and more are coming. It finally allows you to invest in cryptocurrency indexes like Top 10 Layer 2 coins (and 280+ more), we’re exploring adding stocks, DeFi protocols… the future is bright.
If you have any questions, jump on our Telegram channel. It’s quite alive these days.
✦
It was a long break, but I had a good reason. See you next week.