My AI is local, my code is hand-rolled: Why I'm falling in love with building small again It was 2 a.m. and I was staring at my AWS billing dashboard again. My “fun little side project” — LinkNibble, a tool that saves articles and gives me smart summaries — had quietly turned into a mess of Lambda functions, API Gateway, RDS, S3, EventBridge, and way too many IAM roles. All for something that should have been simple. I had fallen into the classic trap: reaching for enterprise cloud tools by default, even though I was the only user. The bill wasn’t insane, but it was ridiculous. Every small change felt unnecessarily complex. I wasn’t building anymore — I was gluing services together. So I decided to go cloud-optional . Not “burn it all down and go off-grid.” Just intentional. For my personal projects, I stopped defaulting to the most complex solution and started asking: What’s the simplest thing that actually works? I moved LinkNibble to a single €5/month Hetzner VPS.…