AI Put Me on a Pedestal. Then I Looked Down
I spent a year building software with AI, then built a tool to measure whether it was working. The first number it gave me was humbling. In eleven days it logged 268 misses, meaning things the AI got wrong or left out. My automated checks caught 46 of them. Agent reviews caught 82. I caught 122. By opening the app and clicking around, like it was 2010. The most common reason something slipped through, 119 times, was not that nobody checked. It was that somebody checked the wrong thing. And the worst number is the one I do not have. I only
Last week I read Alex Lieberman's piece on what an AI-native company actually looks like. Thirty features, twelve categories, the whole operating system rebuilt around AI rather than ChatGPT bolted onto the side of it. Good article, and it made me uncomfortable, which is why I am writing this.
Lieberman is describing companies. I am one person with a full time job, building on nights and weekends, and some weeks I do not open a personal project at all. But four or five items on his list are things I spent the last year learning the hard way and getting wrong first, so instead of nodding along I thought I would write down what one developer found out.
The summary is not flattering. I started with Claude Code in August 2025. I shipped my first thing in August 2026. In between there are twenty one repositories.
Where I started
I had ChatGPT from close to launch, the basic twenty dollar plan, and I used it the way most people did. Paste the problem into the box, read what comes back, copy the useful bit.
Then in June 2025 an old friend showed me something he had built with Claude Code in about two weeks. A demo, but a good one. He had come to me first asking what to do next, and I told him what any developer with grey hair says: it is a financial product, so you need a user guide, proper logging, real tests. I was handing out process before I went looking for one.
In August 2025 I bought the two hundred dollar Claude plan. By October it was obvious I was nowhere near using it. I tried Codex around then, did not find it as good as the Anthropic models, and cancelled my ChatGPT subscriptions. In November I dropped to the hundred dollar plan and have stayed there. I write .NET and have done for close to twenty years, which matters later.
The year, project by project
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