Turbocharged solo dev — zooming out a couple of clicks

People get their kicks in all kinds of ways. Mine was turning vague ideas into quality products.

Not for the praise. Not for the applause. For the electric pleasure of a flow state that led to something tangible minutes (…or was it hours?) later.

But even at my fastest, there was always a bottleneck.

Thinking is much faster than typing.

So I became obsessed with removing friction everywhere else.

I’ve long said that the best way to build is iteratively, in small chunks. You can’t go from 0 to perfect without a few stops on the way, and trying to is an ordeal.

The trick is to make small bets in the right direction, take action, complete them, and adjust course based on what you learn.

Working at Intercom and Linear changed how I think about building. Small precise PRs, landing on prod in minutes. Feature flags. Great tooling. Fast rollback. Constant iteration.

Solo dev

After working like this, building solo hits a bit different.

I’ve been building Windy Gap. It invents routes for you wherever you are. Hiking, running, cycling; Long, medium, short; Hilly or flat. Whatever you’re in the mood for. Then lets you track them — pace, heart rate, elevation gain, live sharing. Constant improvement.

I went all in on building it with AI, but it’s been… different to how I used agents in the past.

The flow state is back, with a vengeance.

I’m using AI as a smart, high-bandwidth tool, while staying deeply engaged with what it’s doing.

I set a strong architecture direction from the ground up and document it in skills. Action-based CMD+K from day one — may sound absurd so early, but now every capability added has an obvious home. Admin tools in CMD+K on day two (I wanted to understand and change the app without leaving it). Feature flags. Helpful scripts. A dev toolbar.

Now I have a pretty stable and feature-complete app. Months of work done in weeks.

Constantly iterating. Small changes. Things crystallizing at incredible speed. A wild ride — drifting, tyres screaming, into new features almost as quickly as they become apparent.

Then removing code. Consolidating. Cleaning up. Leaving the place tidy.

Basically: iterating at speed, orchestrating a team of agents. And it feels great.

I’m spending less time inside functions and more time shaping systems. Everything gets better each iteration. I’m close to the metal but orchestrating as much as diving in. Reading summaries, checking thinking, reviewing plans, setting and correcting direction.

Moving fast

I took a lot of inspiration from great product companies. In building approach, in product thinking, in everything.

But when building solo, things clearly don’t apply one-to-one.

It’s definitely still beneficial to ship small chunks, iteratively. Pages and pages of slop aren’t useful. Hyper-focused changes that improve one thing are. I still PR each change. It’s a living record, documenting choices at a specific moment in time. A breath to ease off and celebrate before flattening the accelerator once again.

I had CI running on PRs for a while. Verifying changes.

It was slow.

With 5 agents working at once on new features, it got in the way. And it increased CI costs. So I turned it off. Now CI only runs on main.

Yes, occasionally it fails and deploys don’t go out. But I notice fast and an agent fixes it. I’ll probably automate that soon too.

Holding all the context and decisions in my own head is what makes it work. I’ve been living and breathing the whole system — like I used to, but more broadly. And it benefits from the care.

I know the shape of things deeply. I can quickly spot a wrong direction. Strong engineering experience still pays off. An agent takes a small shortcut that I know will box things in and lead to all manner of issues down the line. So I step in, tweak things, then step back out and let it speed away.

As a turbocharged solo dev the safety net didn’t disappear. It shifted from process towards judgement. Staying involved and bringing judgement to the game is the game. Without it the teetering pile of half-baked additions collapses under its own weight.

For a while I thought AI had taken the flow away from building.

It hasn’t.

It still feels like coding.

Just zoomed out a couple of clicks.