Don't get me wrong, I think this tool is great and would work wonders for those who aren't experienced developers. But as a senior developer I will probably never use this for serious projects and would only use it for prototyping.

I really tried to like this product but right now my VS Code + Claude Code terminal is still a much better solution or workflow for me because I have far better control over my project. I know I can get Friday to the same level eventually but right now I don't have the patience to work towards it and so it feels like Friday is in control and I'm just there to watch.

A few things to share based on a project I started with Friday using a Next.js template I use to start new projects with my VS Code + Claude Code setup:

- My template required Node 26 as a minimum and for some reason Friday was reporting Node 20. Apparently it was using the Node 20 shim from Electron which Friday was built with I assume. Since it was unable to update its version of Node, I asked it to point its path to my Node 26 installation instead. That did fix the issue.

- My template doesn't use Vite and I have already supplied a .env.local in the project directory with everything the template needed to run. Also, my template uses port 3000. After Friday built the first phase, I'm surprised to see a .env file with Vite and Next.js Supabase environment variables. Weird but okay, we'll consolidate those later. It ran a preview for me and I noticed it was running on port 4209. I don't think Friday actually used the template I had set up before starting with Friday. It is very opinionated about the stack it wants to use instead of what I already had put in place as our starting point. At this point I don't think I have enough control over the project and that I'd be fighting with Friday pretty much the entire development of the project which is why I have rated my review as only 3 tacos.

- The preview was also a bit of a useless feature for me because the login page sent a magic link to my email which when I clicked, opened in my default browser instead of the preview (expected) and got an error because of it. The simplest solution was to login using the same browser where the magic link will be opened from. Friday was also pointing out that the redirect was using port 3000 not 4209 which tells me the app has diverged and confused about how it is set up because Friday decided not to use the template and the environment variables I have set up for it before I even asked Friday to explore the current codebase to understand how the stack is set up.

I only have a few more weeks left but I am leaning more towards refunding this tool because I know I will be fighting with it more than it will help me build my projects and I'd rather use my current VS Code + Claude Code setup which works really well for me as I have more control over my projects than I do with Friday.