I used to feel the same way when working on solo projects, eschewing tests, build automation, and even source control. It wasn't tool long before source contro

I used to feel the same way when working on solo projects, eschewing tests, build automation, and even source control. It wasn't tool long before source control was missed - at it's simplest, it acts like a backup, but having the full history is really useful. Once familiar with SVN (this was 15 or so years ago), it really didn't add any overhead at all. I thought tests would he too much work to maintain - but looking back, it was clear that it was my lack of experience and understanding that was the problem. The way I was writing tests, laden heavy with mocks, and brittle as a result, was resulting in crap tests. Much later, when I'd finished making terrible mistakes, but had learned a lot from the process, I realised how helpful tests were. I believe they are usually a net benefit - the number of times where I write a test for something that seems really simple, and it fails, is higher than I'd like to admit. Failing fast during dev is far prefer to having to diagnose production issues. And it also means I can refactor with much more confidence. Also, for OSS projects, I think the presence of a good test suite inspires confidence in users. When working solo, the time taken for manual tasks also irked me - especially when preparing final releases, where I was anxious not to get things wrong - building for different platforms, creating installers, putting together configs, putting together docs, code signing, running things through Virus Total, publishing binaries... it took soooo long, and was error prone. In the beginning, automating this kind of stuff seemed like a mountain, but again with experience came competence and confidence. And the time savings were great, and the extra confidence around releases was huge. Each to their own of course, but for anything non-trivial I wouldn't be without source control, tests or build automation.