> Naively, I'd say to create symlinks instead of copying,

I did mean symlinks too. The rest of my system shouldn't have to know or care about my project at all.

I just wanna be able to systemctl --user start ./my-service.service or something to that effect.

> I just wanna be able to systemctl --user start ./my-service.service or something to that effect.

Can you not? I know that systemctl has a userspace dot folder for user's services.

[0] `~/.config/systemd/user/`