DEV Community: Sona Badalyan

Are We Losing the Joy of Coding? 🤔

Sona Badalyan — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:09:01 +0000

Development cycles are getting shorter.

With AI coding assistants like Claude Code and other vibe-coding tools, we can build and deliver projects much faster than before. As developers, this is exciting — we can move from an idea to a working product in days instead of weeks.

But recently, I noticed something about myself.

I stopped keeping up with the latest React Native releases.

I used to follow new versions, read release notes, try new APIs, and experiment with new libraries. I enjoyed understanding how things worked and discovering better ways to build something.

Now, more often, I describe what I want, let AI write the code, review the result, fix a few things, and move on.

The development cycle is faster.

But somehow, I feel less connected to the code.

And I think I've lost a little bit of the excitement I used to have about coding.

Don't get me wrong — I love what AI coding tools can do. They remove a lot of repetitive work and allow us to focus on bigger problems. But there is a strange side effect:

When we stop writing as much code, do we also stop learning as deeply?

Maybe the problem isn't AI itself. Maybe it's how we use it.

There is a difference between:

“Build this feature for me.”

and

“Help me understand how to build this feature better.”

The first makes us faster.

The second might make us better developers.

I'm now trying to find a better balance — using AI to speed up implementation while still making time to explore new React Native releases, understand the underlying technologies, and occasionally build something without asking AI to do everything for me.

I’m curious:

Is it just me, or are other developers also feeling this?

Are AI coding tools making you more excited about development — or are you also starting to miss the feeling of actually coding?

My husband built a club where indie founders promote each other: meet c4c.club

Sona Badalyan — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 06:26:23 +0000

c4c.club was built by my husband. I've watched him launch side projects for years, and I've also watched the same thing happen every time: the building part goes great, and then the project sits there with almost no visitors.

Launch directories give you one spike and then silence. Paid ads have minimum budgets and you're up against companies with real marketing teams. SEO takes months. After seeing so many indie founders struggle with exactly this, he built something to fix it, and I wanted to share it here because I think a lot of you will find it useful.

The idea

c4c.club is a club where indie founders show each other's ads on their own sites. The motto is: we'll show your ad first, return the favor later.

How it works

Add your app. Paste your URL, and it picks up the name and icon automatically. No code on your site and no domain verification to get started.
Your ad goes live. Write one line of ad copy, and your project starts appearing on other members' sites. New members get 50 free credits, enough for up to around 200 visitors depending on where they come from.
Host to keep it running. If you like the results, add one snippet to your own site to show an ad slot. Every genuine click you send to another founder earns you 80% of that click's value in credits for your own ad.

What I like most about this is that you get value before you're asked to give anything back. Most ad-swap networks make you host first and hope it pays off later.

Pricing

No subscription. You pay per click, priced by the visitor's country:

Clicks cost between $0.06 and $1 (0.25 to 4 credits), so you don't pay premium rates for traffic that's unlikely to convert.
1 credit = $0.25. Credit packs range from $10 to $100 as one-time Stripe payments, and purchased credits never expire.
When credits run out, your ad simply pauses until you top up.
Only clicks that pass fraud checks are charged.

📢 We're looking for publishers!

This is where we'd really love your help. The club grows when more founders host an ad slot, so if your site, blog, tool, or side project gets any traffic, you can earn from it while helping other indie builders get seen.

How it works for publishers:

Paste one snippet. You get a single ad slot on your site showing projects from other indie founders. No flashy banners, no tracking-heavy ad networks.
Every ad is approved by hand. You won't end up showing spam or anything sketchy to your visitors.
Keep 80% of every click. Each genuine click you send pays you in credits.
Spend it or cash it out. Use your credits to promote your own project, or withdraw them. Earnings clear after 30 days, and from $25 you can cash out through Tremendous, a payout platform used by thousands of businesses.
Earn a backlink. The top 50 publishers by clicks are listed on the publisher leaderboard with a dofollow link to their site.

What one click pays you, by visitor country:

Tier	You earn per click
Premium	$0.80 (3.2 credits)
High	$0.60 (2.4 credits)
Standard	$0.40 (1.6 credits)
Emerging	$0.20 (0.8 credits)
Developing	$0.05 (0.2 credits)

You can see which countries fall into each tier on the rates page. Every click goes through the fraud checks described below before it pays, which also protects you as a publisher: the network stays trustworthy, so advertisers keep coming back.

Whether you run a dev blog, a free tool, a newsletter archive, or a directory, one small slot is all it takes.

👉 Add your site as a publisher

The "bouncer"

A click-exchange only works if nobody games it, so credits never move the instant someone clicks. Each click is held and checked first:

Self-clicks and traffic between sites owned by the same person are rejected.
Repeat clicks from one visitor are capped per site, per day.
Bots, impossible timings, and spoofed referrers get flagged.
Anything suspicious waits for a human review instead of paying out.

Bonus: backlinks for advertisers too

The 50 ads with the most clicks are listed on the leaderboard with a dofollow link to their project. For a new domain, that's a small but real SEO boost.

Your first ad is free and needs no code, so trying it costs you about five minutes.

👉 Have a project to promote? Launch your free ad

👉 Have a site with traffic? Become a publisher

Tell us what you think in the comments. And if you've used other ways to get your first users, I'd love to hear those too! 👇

I Built an Open-Source Prompt-to-Video Generator (React + TypeScript)

Sona Badalyan — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:45:31 +0000

Recently I built a small open-source project called Prompt-to-Video that generates short videos from text prompts.

The goal of this project is to make it easy to experiment with prompt-based video generation and automate simple video creation workflows.

🔗 GitHub repository:
https://github.com/sbadalyan/prompt-to-video

What the project does

Prompt-to-Video allows you to generate short videos by providing a text prompt. The application processes the prompt and generates a video automatically.

This can be useful for experimenting with AI-driven media generation or automating simple content workflows.

Tech Stack

The project is built with:

React
TypeScript

Features

Generate videos from text prompts
Lightweight and easy to run
Simple and customizable codebase
Open-source and available on GitHub

Getting Started

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/sbadalyan/prompt-to-video

Follow the setup instructions in the README to run the project locally.

Feedback

I would really appreciate any feedback, ideas, or contributions from the community.

If you're interested, feel free to check out the repository and share your thoughts.