How Do You Measure This?

I'm 47. Before diving back into a new venture, I was seriously considering either retiring from tech soon or giving it one last good shot. I wasn't sure if I had the energy left to build a whole new product from scratch. But instead of feeling exhausted, I feel better than ever.

For the past several months I've been working on Widgetizer alone. Just me, Claude as my wingman, Codex as my reviewer, and GitKraken to push to GitHub. No weird harnesses, no complex prompts, no frameworks to manage. Just one task at a time, moving faster than I ever have.

Being able to test three or four different approaches to a problem, something that was simply impossible before due to cost and time constraints, is liberating. Psychologically, it changes my entire relationship with my work. I don't have to get it right the first time. I can experiment, throw things away, and find the elegant path. I feel like there is nothing holding me back.

I don't care about the AI doomerism or the noise. It’s just not on my radar. I care about what works. And my solo productivity was steadily up 10x.

Teaming up

Then, a month ago, my partner joined me.

If one person using AI is 10x, the natural expectation is that two of us would be 20x. But that’s not how it feels. For some reason, it feels like way more.

We've only been at it together for a month, and the leaps we've made are huge. He picked up an 18-month-old codebase and got up to speed immediately. Now we are in the middle of a super complex phase: making sure the open-source version can be used pretty much as-is in the hosted version we are preparing. Not an easy task. But looking at what we've managed to figure out in the last four weeks, I find myself asking: how do I even measure this?

The communication tax

In a traditional setup, adding a second person doesn’t double the speed. It introduces friction. We have to sync, align on architecture, write specs, and wait for feedback. The communication overhead eats a massive chunk of our day.

But when both of us have Claude and Codex in our corner, something else happens. We don't just write code faster. We think and validate faster. We can pick up a complex chunk of the roadmap, figure out the architecture, prototype three versions, and submit a clean, working PR in a couple of days. We review it, merge it, and move on. There is no waiting. No "let's have a meeting to discuss how we do this."

When we eliminate the communication bottlenecks and combine it with AI-assisted execution, a team of two starts operating like a bigger organization. We aren't just moving twice as fast, we're moving at a velocity where the distance between idea and production is almost zero.

I don't know if we're at 20x, 30x, or more. All I know is that we are building Widgetizer at a speed that feels completely surreal.

It's only been a month, and we're just getting started.

Onwards, fren.