Five weeks got favURL live. Six months in, I want to write down something different: not how it started, but how fast it kept moving after that and why I no longer think that speed was a fluke of a good first sprint.
Confidence is not the same as certainty
When I shipped the first version I was confident in the idea and unsure about almost everything else, whether I could keep a solo codebase coherent, whether AI-assisted development would hold up past a demo or whether I even understood my own product well enough to keep improving it. Six months of shipping, breaking things and fixing them has answered most of that. I still do not know everything. What changed is that I trust the process now, not just the idea.
Why the curve bends up, not flat
The naive assumption going in was that AI help would make each feature roughly as fast to build as the last one, a flat improvement over doing it by hand. That is not what happened. Every feature I shipped made the next one faster to describe, because the codebase itself became part of the context. Patterns I had already established for editing, for auth or for billing became things I could point back to instead of explain from scratch. The AI was not just writing code faster. It was reasoning about a system that kept getting more legible the longer I worked in it.
That is the part I think people underestimate about AI-assisted development for small apps specifically. A large team hits coordination costs that scale with headcount. A solo builder using AI well hits the opposite curve: the more the project exists, the less each new piece costs to add, because there is more real structure to build on top of and a collaborator that can hold all of it in view at once.
What actually got easier
Not the ideas. Not the product decisions, those are still entirely mine and still take real thought. What got easier was everything downstream of a decision: turning “owners should be able to reorder sections” into working code, catching the edge cases I would have missed on a first pass and refactoring something I built five weeks earlier without dreading it. Six months ago each of those was a small event. Now they are Tuesday.
Where I landed
I do not think AI made me a better engineer overnight. I think it removed enough friction between having an idea and testing whether it was any good that I could afford to have more ideas cheaply and throw out the bad ones fast. For something the size of favURL, one person and no funding, that difference is not incremental. It compounds. Six months in, I believe the compounding is the actual story, more than any single feature I shipped.
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