Solo developers don't skip code review because they think it's unnecessary. They skip it because there's nobody to do it. You wrote the code, you tested the code, you deployed the code. At no point did a second set of eyes touch anything. The
Every tool you add to your stack is a commitment. Not a one-time cost, but a recurring one: updates, configuration drift, mental overhead, another login, another tab, another monthly charge. Over the past year of building solo, I've added dozens of tools. But the more interesting list is
I spent my first month building with AI the way most people do: fast, confident, and wrong about several important things. The speed was real. The output was real. The mistakes were expensive in ways I didn't notice until week five. Here are three that cost me actual
There is a moment in every solo builder's AI journey where the relationship changes. You stop asking the model questions and start giving it tasks. The interface looks the same. The economics are completely different. Most people who use AI are still in tool mode. They open a
A client has never told me "I wish you had more people." What they've told me, in various phrasings over several years, is "I wish I knew what was happening without having to ask." That distinction matters more than most solo builders realize. Clients
A month ago I wrote "Month Zero" and made a bunch of predictions about what building in public would look like. Here's the scorecard. Some of those predictions held up. Most didn't. The numbers tell a story that's different from what I
Every solo builder hits the same wall with AI. You paste context into a prompt, get a useful response, and then the next conversation starts from zero. The AI has no memory. It doesn't know your clients, your conventions, your past decisions. You're doing the same
Every solo builder hits the same wall. Not a revenue wall or a skill wall. A time wall. There are 168 hours in a week, and after you subtract sleep, eating, exercise, and whatever passes for a personal life, you're left with maybe 50-60 productive hours. When the
The most dangerous moment in a solo build isn't the technical challenge. It's Tuesday night, the core feature works, and you think: one more thing. On a team, this impulse runs into friction. A product manager pushes back. A sprint boundary intervenes. A coworker asks whether
Every solo builder starts with the wrong stack. Not wrong in the sense of broken or stupid. Wrong in the sense of theoretical. You pick tools based on what you think your workflow will look like, and that mental model has almost no relationship to what your workflow actually becomes
A solo builder who bills $150/hour and works 30 billable hours a week makes $234K a year. On paper, that's a strong number. In practice, it means that every week without a client is a week without income. Every vacation is unpaid. Every slow January is a
Every tool you add to your stack is a commitment. Not a one-time cost, but a recurring one: updates, configuration drift, mental overhead, another login, another tab, another monthly charge. Over the past year of building solo, I've added dozens of tools. But the more interesting list is