Building Solo, With an Agent
I build most of this alone, but not really alone. What working with an AI coding agent actually changes, where it carries real weight, and where you still have to be the one who understands.
I build most of this platform by myself. That is true, and also a little misleading, because for the last stretch I have been building with an AI coding agent at my side the whole way. If you are going to work this way too, it is worth being honest about what it actually changes, because the honest version is smaller and more useful than the hype around it.
The biggest thing it removes is activation energy. You know the hardest moment in solo work: the blank file at the start of a task you do not feel like beginning. The agent makes that moment cheap. You describe what you want, you get a first pass that is most of a scaffold, and you start editing instead of staring. If you have no team to bounce off, that one shift is the difference between a feature shipping this week and it sitting in your head for a month.
It carries real weight in a specific place: the work that is more tedious than hard. Boilerplate you would resent writing. An unfamiliar API you would otherwise lose an afternoon to. Holding context across a codebase too big to keep in your head. Writing the test you would have quietly skipped. Hand it that, and it is a tireless pair.
But here is where you still have to drive, and it is the part the breathless takes leave out: everything that takes judgment. What is worth building at all. How the pieces should fit so the system still makes sense a year from now. Whether a confident-looking answer is actually right, because the failure mode is not gibberish, it is plausible and wrong. The agent will happily build the thing you should not build. Knowing not to is still your job, and it does not get outsourced.
So the discipline that makes this work is unglamorous, and you should hold yourself to it: small steps you can verify, reading every line before it lands, and never confusing a fast draft for a finished decision. Used that way, it is the reason one person can credibly run a platform this size. Used carelessly, it is a very efficient way to generate problems you do not understand yet.
It does not replace understanding the system. What it does is lower the cost of acting on the understanding you already have, which, when you are the only one in the room, turns out to be most of the battle.