jascination

Like many, I use Claude for therapy/personal related stuff. I have a project set up which has a personal history, as well as things I talk about with my therapist, schemas, things I believe in and value, stuff like that. In challenging moments where there are things I want to process, I do voice recordings and use this project to reflect/process feelings and thoughts.

In the project instructions, I tell it to not be sycophantic, to always talk to me with a grounding in science and evidence-based theory, and to hold me accountable and gently challenge me when needed.

I find this good, but sometimes I feel like its responses are a bit boilerplate and generic.

Curious how other, more techy people set up projects / etc to do similar sorts of things.

I'm in Australia, and I work as a contractor on AU$1200/day (US$800, EU730, GBP610).

I'm a full-stack JS developer, I mainly build apps in React Native. Usually I'll come into an agency or a startup for 6 - 12 months and build an MVP, shaping the pre-launch product, system architecture, blueprint design, that sorta thing.

I've done this sort of contracting for ~10 years, and while it's fine it's starting to feel a bit stale for me.

I also have a family (and a mortgage) now, so I want to earn more money.

The problem: I earn ~AU$300k (US$200k, EU180k) as a contractor, yet the only full-time roles for a lead dev or tech lead here pay $160k - $180k.

So I can give up contracting for more career progression, but that means taking a massive pay cut.

I could also try to become one of those LevelsIo / MarcLou #buildinpublic "I earn $50k/mo!" guys, but at 37 with two toddlers I don't have the mental fortitude to post self-promotions on X and TikTok as often as this requires.

Has anyone been in this situation before? What did you do?