I left a job in January.

I left a job in January. No drama. It was time.

I spent the next six weeks doing what looked like nothing. Walking. Reading. Thinking about what I actually wanted to build.

Then on February 26th, I had tokens expiring on my GitHub Copilot account. I was in a group text with friends, and I wanted to add someone to the chat. So I asked Claude to build me a group chat app.

I set it to the most expensive model. 30x the normal rate. Use it or lose it.

90 minutes later, I had a working group chat app. SMS auth, push notifications, real-time messaging. Deployed.

Three bugs. Fixed in five minutes. Then we worked on the feature list for the rest of the afternoon.

That was the moment I realized everything had changed. Not because AI is magic. Because I’d spent six weeks learning how to think with it - and when the moment came, the instrument was ready.

sidefire.net

I’ll tell you what happened two days later. It’s worse. And better.