Doing it all alone — solo development, and AI as a partner

I build all of STIL. myself — the planning, the architecture, the design, the code, the store copy. Today is about that "alone."

Why do it alone

Some things would be faster handed off. I still do them myself because STIL. began from one motive: to make the thing I wanted for myself.

In the very first post on this blog, I wrote about always making something on the side of the company I've worked at for twenty years. At the day job, we build big things, as a team, soundly. That has its own reward. But I wanted, separately, one place where I could push my own taste all the way through — down to a single line of copy, the tone of a background, the choice of a film look. STIL. is that place.

My taste probably doesn't point toward pleasing everyone. It leans expert, fussy about details. Those "corners" get rounded off when handed to someone else. So the parts I don't want rounded, I do myself. Doing it alone isn't about efficiency — it's because there are things I don't want to give up.

Alone, it doesn't run

That said, honestly, it's more than one person can run.

I have a day job, I'm thinking about the family business, I'm studying for a qualification. On top of that, I build STIL. from planning to code to the copy on the shelf. By any honest count, there isn't enough time.

To make up for that missing time, I've worked fairly seriously at building AI in as a partner. Research, first drafts, rough text, keeping records in order — work that takes one human half a day, I hand to AI, so I can concentrate on judgement and on pushing my taste through. Handing work to AI is less about saving time than about keeping work moving that one person alone never could.

This is also my biggest interest right now: building a way to work "alone, yet do more than one person's worth." STIL. is partly the test bench for it.

Hand it off, but decide it yourself

There's one line I draw. The final judgement is always mine.

Even when AI makes a first draft, deciding "is this good" is on me. The colours, the words, what features to keep or cut. What can be handed off is the work, not the taste. If anything, being able to hand off the work has increased my responsibility to be clear about what I actually like. The faster the tools get, the more the last question becomes: "so — what do you want?"

What only one person can make

Big organisations can make things only big organisations can. In the same way, I think one person can make things only one person can — a kind of coherence you can only get when the hesitations, the biases, and the tastes all resolve inside a single head.

If STIL. ever gives you the feeling that a single thread runs through it, that's probably because one person made it. I want to keep hold of that.

Next time, as the close of Season 1 of this series, I'll write about how one app grows into a family.

You'll find STIL. at stil.photo, and the app on the App Store.