Increasing My Velocity As a Solo Developer

Balancing a full-time job with frequent travel leaves little room for side projects, yet my drive to build remains strong. With agentic programming tools, which allow me to offload some of the process to AI, I’ve found ways to keep exploring technology and bringing ideas to life at a pace I once thought impossible.

Leveraging AI development tools has been essential to this process, helping me maintain a growing portfolio of apps and websites alongside my primary career where I’m often working 48-plus hours a week supporting hospital systems across North America.

My Process

My primary focus is to build products I want to use—dogfooding the products I’m building simplifies the whole testing phase since I’m using them daily. I get a feel for how the product actually fits into the context of my life, and I can quickly weed out the pain points.

Issue Capture

TestFlight’s “screenshot to create an issue” feature is invaluable. At any given moment I can take a screenshot, make myself a note, and move on with my day. Then when I get the chance to sit down and triage issues, I can clean them up and ingest everything into Linear.

On top of that, having two-way sync between Linear and GitHub means progress is visible to interested users even before a build hits devices. Issues and conversations on GitHub flow directly into Linear, which keeps it as the single place I check for everything.

Building

These days I use a mixture of Codex and Cursor for building, occasionally jumping into Xcode when needed (the Codex integration there is decent, but I prefer the bespoke Codex app). Between Cursor and Codex it’s personally hard to pick a favorite.

Because Cursor is built on top of the VSCode foundations, it’s instantly tapped into all of the themes and extensions that I was using for years before swapping over to agentic programming tools.

On the other hand, that’s partly the issue: because Cursor is built on top of the VSCode foundations, it feels like the tools that I’ve been using for years before swapping over to agentic programming tools. There’s legacy cruft (especially visually) that can make Cursor—quite frankly—less fun to use. It’s an amazing tool and is pioneering a lot of interesting use cases, but Codex just feels better to use in a meaningful way.

Shipping

My goal is to ship in line with the complexity of the project—a simple app like Just. Weather. doesn’t get as much attention as a significantly more complex one like FediReader. With that, release cadence can vary wildly, but across all of my projects (FediReader, Routines, Just. Weather., and Build Notes) as well as my less-refined personal creative studio, The Digital Renaissance, I’m shipping something 3–4 times a week.

One day I might release a new blog post on The Digital Renaissance, commenting on something going on in the tech world, the next might be a new build of FediReader exploring a new messaging paradigm for the Social Web. As someone with many varied interests, this process unlocks so much flexibility for me to explore all of them.

Final Thoughts

For me, the push into agentic coding has made the process much more accessible. I’m able to build the projects that I find the most interesting and I can do it at a meaningful pace while also finding balance with the rest of my life. I can ship at a pace that previously required the focus of a full-time dev, I can explore entire worlds of new technology, and I can make a direct impact on the Social Web.