For four months I disappeared into the abyss of the machine. And clawed my way out to tell the tale.

Crawled hand by hand from the belly of the whale of progress, grind, and the acceleration explosion that we’re seeing all around us. I lost the sense of time as the updates and releases, competitors, alerts, and notifications dinged off in the background, the stacked PR merges, the endless commits filling out my GitHub profile like a creeping vine along the fence line.

And so I haven’t written here in four months. I’ve been deep, way too deep, deeper than you should go without a flashlight or a cofounder or an income. Deep in the systems, prompts, agents, and issues - rebuilding workflows ad infinitum into half-finished agent loops running into their efficient oblivions.

It was real work, but it’s been invisible. It hasn’t made me the income I need to keep the lifestyle going. Sure, there have been a ton of wild adventures here in SE Asia. But adventures don’t pay the bills, at least not yet (crossing fingers for DiveJourney).

I basically overbuilt my whole system. Had a problem? System. Did something more than twice? New system. New release on a new model or agent workflow? New system to take advantage of it. And while that’s been insane, it also means I’ve been fucking around too much to get any real income or traction.

That’s not to say I haven’t been getting work done. I’ve been busier than ever in my life, and I’ve learned more about agent engineering, solo systems, dev systems, and full-stack everything than I ever had a chance to learn as a primarily FE engineer all these years. Truly breathtaking, the amount you can learn when you build something these days and have an intelligence on par with, and sometimes better than, the best engineers in human history.

I’ve realized it’s so easy to spin up new projects and systems that are really good, and that code is super cheap - not just code, but good code - that it’s difficult to say no.

But “no” is what’s required to move forward.

At least until profitability. After that I’ll likely go back to just learning a ton of stuff for fun forever.

But for now, that superpower of artificial intelligence is the siren that calls to me, the open-ended optionality that I’ve always dreamed of to satiate my many interests and ideas constantly competing for my attention, and for the first time I feel like I have the ability and the tools to actually create them as fast as I can think of them (almost).

But building harnesses don’t pay the bills (but probably will) and neither does systems thinking (unless you have a high-paying SWE job - or unless you choose to leave that high-paying job to build your own product visions during the rising wave of AI - (unless those actually do pay off pay off - which I think they will).

The Reality Now

I have two products in motion.

DiveJourney - which will become the best dive planning and discovery platform there is, has shipped a ton and continues to improve at breakneck speed, and is my passion project - but unfortunately, as mentioned, doesn’t pay the bills yet. So it still matters and still will get some love, but a lot of that love will be time-boxed and automated until there’s some more cash in the bank.

Kitecraft is my main commercial bet: AI visibility software for solo founders who want to understand how answer engines describe them, where they’re invisible, and what content or site updates can fix it.

More coming soon.

But it’s been disorienting, dare I say - discombobulating, checking X each day and seeing a brand new model, feature, product, release that shakes up the entire developer, engineering, and SaaS ecosystem all at once. It’s insane.

I think we’re getting near the point of acceleration where we can no longer keep up. I know for sure that if I were working full-time at a company, I don’t think I could keep up.

As of now, since I’m only working on my own products, I have time to read about what came out, try it out, compare it to what I have and the alternatives, and think about what it means for the ecosystem, and what it means for me, my products, and my existential crises.

Truly exciting times. You get that endorphin rush when you use something new and it clicks - I, and the rest of the world, will use that to rewrite the whole game.

The thing is, that’s happening at least once every two days, if not multiple times in the same day. I think back in the fall it was once every couple of weeks, and we’ve accelerated to roughly once a day at this point.

I don’t know how my friends at their full-time jobs are keeping up. I’ve seen it said before: you either have the time to research and know what's going on with these things (because you’re unemployed) or the cash to pay for the tokens to use them.

I’m hoping I can get both.

Anyway, I’m switching up the game: focusing on getting to profitability now and being more visible in what I’m learning and how it’s revolutionizing how I work. If I’m diving deep into this stuff, I might as well share what’s worth digging into and help others out. All while practicing the great human trait of writing and thinking — instead of having artificial intelligence communicate for you.

There is so much interesting stuff going on, and I’d love to chase all of it.

But that has to wait until I make the hard bank.

Or until I can justify going down those glorious learning side-quests.

For now, the game is profitability, locking in, and visible output.

Less disappearing into the machine. More bringing something back from it.