I run into the same thing with Cursor. After updates I sometimes see models reset to Auto after an update. I'm not sure it that is intentional or bad coding on their part.
I made that same mistake a long time ago. Fortunately after many years I slowly stopped getting texts and emails - probably cuz it was a just a small donation.
Unfortunately I still constantly bombarded by one of the parties - because a long time ago I was registered as one - even though I changed it to no party affiliation a years ago. Once you're on those types of list you are f'd.
Back in 2023 I wanted to create a corp dashboard - simple auth and rbac, charts, summaries, etc - and wanted it done with sveltekit. Me and the other dev planned on working over the weekend to have a simple prototype to demo on Monday and planned on a week or so to get the whole thing done.
I was shocked when it built a usable version in one shot and instead of having a prototype to demo, we basically had the whole thing done in a few hours.
A lot of developers focus on the build part because that's what they know best. Selling and marketing a new product is really hard and takes way more time than you think - unless you get lucky.
If you believe your SaaS can actually make money then you should continue but I would focus on outreach. Things like articles and online posts are fine to establish your credentials and make a potential customer comfortable paying but they aren't good for getting sales. I'm not sure I would spend time on SEO unless you already have a ton of experience with it - personally I think the combo of chatGPT and Google search getting worse made people use search engines less.
If I were you I would prioritize finding gig that pays and use your free time to market your SaaS.
It says its only open to business and enterprise accounts and I'm not sure I would trust this for anything meaningful for a business, especially since they are hosting the site.
Would folks here want to have dashboard or similar internal sites with internal data hosted on OpenAI?
Would you be comfortable with non-techs having the ability to spin up sites?
I see problems on the business side and it seems better as a consumer-focused Wix or Squarespace alternative for portfolios and those type of personal sites.
"What if I made the apple magic mouse into a car?"
It would've been cool if it was a sporty version of a Toyota Prius but it is not cool as a Ferrari. It's hard to believe a "car person" designed that thing. I saw somewhere that Ferrari gave LoveFrom the initial design but who knows since I doubt anyone is going to take responsibility for something that is universally panned.
I think tech meetups still happen all the time and covid mainly caused them to occur in online and differently. Now you seem them on youtube, streaming, discord, etc. They're different from the pre-covid days but they still exist imo.
It really depends on what you are building. I remember asking a Jr Dev to put up a simple static website of just a few pages and they were getting lost in react. Being an OG dev, I had to show them how to get it done faster and in a more lightweight manner with plain HTML, javascript and CSS. It was a simple site but the dev didn't know better cuz everything was done in react at the code camp they went to.
Conversely, I had Claude build a webapp for internal purposes to help translate some content we were creating. It was done in HTML, JS and tailwind with no framework. After a while, I could see that the jank it kept adding would be a problem so I had Claude refactor it using sveltekit.
I think companies are starting to realize that big AI companies were partially subsidizing the costs and that it is more expensive than they realized. They will probably start to monitor token usage.
I use AI for a lot of coding and it takes effort and experience to reduce some of the excess cruft it likes to add.
Sounds like they have an established culture that works for them and you are feeling like you might not be a good fit. The Manager had a 1:1 with you to make sure you stay in your lane and it sounds like they just want someone who will do their assigned tickets. You'll need to decide if it's the role, environment and culture you want.