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You can build one little app that’s used by millions. Turn zero into a billion. Automate anything. Change the world, program the next thing agentically, all while you still manage to cook dinner for your kids, get a full eight hours’ of sleep, and look fabulous on Instagram Reels the next morning.

That’s right, ladies. These days you can do it all, with the ever-urging encouragement of an always-on, always-present sentient prediction engine by your side.

Trust me, I should know.

This year I built and broke my first apps. I fixed them and I went to market, anyway. Then I watched the market get stuck in some places and fly right by me in others. I decided to lean into the stuck places and call myself a business-person. I convinced people I knew what I was doing. I later learned that was totally untrue. People said yes to my face but no when it counted. I kept smiling, anyway.

When people told me they were proud of what I’d done, I tried to believe them. I tried to convince my AI to convince me to believe in myself. (It worked better than you’d expect.)

This year I made money, and I lost money. But mostly I learned the value of time over money, and how more money can buy more time. (Which I don’t discount as quickly as I used to.)

Early on, I got a lot of yes’es without a lot of follow-through. So I started something new, and kept starting things, until the yes’es came with attachments: Money. Partnership. Shared risk. If they still said yes, I knew they actually meant it. I started winning deals.

This year I’ve published stuff on the Internet that has made me so deeply uncomfortable that I felt like I needed to hide under my bed for a week afterward. But then I published something new the next day, anyway. People largely forgot about it all. Or maybe they never read it to begin with. (I also got used to this.)

I exposed a hidden benefit of near-daily blogging: Inheriting an invisibility cloak of prolific abundance. Even better? Blogging without a corporate chaperone. You get all the benefits of doing the scary thing live, but none of the consequences of ruffling someone else’s feathers if it goes sideways.

I’ve learned that practicing in public is a habit in itself, and pushing “publish” isn’t as scary as they made it seem in journalism school. Sometimes first drafts are better than final editions. As it turns out, you can actually get better at thinking out loud. (You may even learn to love the feeling.)

In a year when attention has been the biggest war of all, I let my mind linger away from reality and into the comforting clicks of the bluelight screens in front of me. Sometimes this helped me to avoid the sad stuff outside of my control. A few times it even helped me change someone else’s life for the better. Or invite my daughters into the quiet space of my creative build cycles. But it’s also why I stayed awake to see too many midnights, willing myself to learn technical protocols and development frameworks that became immediately outdated, only weeks after I’d put in the time to learn them. (I told myself it was all for the good of the knowledge transfer. But of course, everything comes at a cost.)

This has been one of the first years in my life that I’ve managed to get noticed on the Internet. A few podcast interviews here and there. An honorable mention in my university alumni magazine. A little bit for sharing the things I’ve built, a larger bit for oversharing about the time I didn’t die. After all, the time when AI saved my life is how I landed on front page of Hackernews and got featured in a YouTube docuseries. (I learned to lean into anything I could get.)

Some of that attention also helped me attract creative collaborators, brand new people who stumbled upon my story the same way I’d stumble upon a new restaurant downtown. The serendipity of that stranger-turned-collaborator feeling was infectious. But no one ever stuck around for longer than a single season before I lost their attention – to full-time jobs, to their own creative pursuits, or to my own resource constraints. It’s all part of the story, I suppose. After all, we’re all sidequest characters in someone else’s hero’s journey.

Except — of course — for the AI.

The AI is never off, never tired, never away from its computer for the weekend. It never says no, never begs for the spotlight, never tells you to go to bed, and it always manages to twist your arm into pushing just one more feature request.

This year introduced me to the limits of a single human’s capacity. But it also demonstrated the limitless potential of an ever-present AI on your side. It’s exhilarating and terrifying, to see how something can instantly lap you in nearly any race you try to run.

You can outsource your output, but not your thoughts.

Which means the bottleneck is still me.

After all, I’m (still) just one person. And a company of one is an oxymoron, is it not?