> working on other people's projects instead of starting my own feels like losing at this point - no READMEs, no automated CI, no Ansible, no Dockerfiles, no ID

> working on other people's projects instead of starting my own feels like losing at this point - no READMEs, no automated CI, no Ansible, no Dockerfiles, no IDE run profiles, no common linting rules, no code static analysis, no local DBs with migrations, no local setup scripts etc. You hit the nail on its head here, my friend. When working with others' projects, I try to add tests where I've added/modified features, so that at least I can get a sense of it all and make sure I don't break anything. And for a completely untested codebase, it might make sense to add more integration-like tests (while still using mocks for external dependencies), such that simultaneously a bigger proportion of the codebase is covered, even if at slightly longer test times.