Why I Stopped Copy-Pasting Repositories and Started Building My Own Starter CLI

Every developer has a "starter project." Some keep a GitHub template. Some duplicate their previous SaaS project. Some run create-next-app and spend the next two hours installing the same dependencies, configuring the same tools, and recreating the same folder structure. I was in the second group. Every new project started the same way. bun create next-app Then came the checklist. Install Tailwind CSS. Configure Biome. Add shadcn/ui. Organize folders. Set up a UI library. Configure TypeScript. Add environment files. Set up a monorepo. Copy utility functions. Configure path aliases. Install development tools. None of these tasks were difficult. They were just repetitive. After starting enough projects, I realized something: I wasn't building products. I was rebuilding the same foundation over and over again. The Starter Kit Trap Like many developers, I created a "starter repository." Whenever I wanted to build something new, I'd clone it. It worked... until it didn't. Eventually I had multiple starter repositories. One for a monorepo. One for a standalone project. One with authentication. One without authentication. One for experiments. One that was already outdated. Keeping them synchronized became its own maintenance project. Fix a bug in one. Forget to fix it in another. Upgrade Next.js in one repository. Forget the rest. The more starters I created, the less useful they became. Why Existing Starters Didn't Quite Fit There are already fantastic starter kits in the ecosystem. Some focus on minimalism. Others include every feature imaginable. The problem wasn't that they were bad. The problem was that they optimized for someone else's workflow. Every project I build starts with almost the same stack. Next.js TypeScript Bun/pnpm Tailwind CSS v4 shadcn/ui Biome Production-ready project structure I didn't want to answer twenty configuration questions every time I scaffolded a project. I wanted one command. npx create-notils my-app …and be ready to start building. Opini