// essay
building with AI, honestly
not the hype, not the backlash. where AI actually moves the needle when you're shipping solo, and where it quietly eats your week.
i build most things solo now, mostly with AI. KnowYourPay, Sniff, this site. so this isn't a take from the cheap seats. it's what it actually feels like.
where it helps is real and large. AI collapses the distance between an idea and a working version of it. the thing that used to take a weekend of setup takes an evening. for a solo builder that's not a productivity bump, it's a different category of what you can attempt alone.
it's a tireless junior who is fast, confident, and occasionally, fluently wrong.
where it quietly costs you is judgment. it will happily build the wrong thing, beautifully. it removes the friction that used to make you stop and ask whether the thing was worth building at all. the weeks i've lost to AI were never because it was slow. they were because it let me move fast in a direction i hadn't thought hard enough about.
how i actually use it
fast on the execution, slow on the decision. i let it write the code and i keep the taste. the part that's still entirely mine is knowing what's worth making and what to throw away. that part, so far, doesn't autocomplete.