I started SelfManager.ai in 2016 as a side project. It was a tiny tool to digitize a planning system I was already using on paper - one column per date, with what I had to do that day underneath. No projects, no boards, no labels. Just dates and tasks.
Nine years later I'm still building it. The first 7 years were part-time, on evenings and weekends. The last 2 years have been full-time.
The part nobody talks about honestly: roughly halfway through year 8, AI coding assistants stopped being a novelty and started being load-bearing in my workflow. This is what actually changed - and what didn't.
The pre-AI baseline
For the first 7 years, my shipping rhythm looked like this:
A new feature would sit in my head for weeks before I touched code. I'd think about the data model on walks. I'd sketch the UI on paper. By the time I opened the editor, I already knew the shape of what I was building, because I couldn't afford to discover it during implementation - discovery cost too many evenings.
What changed in year 8
I started using Claude Opus 4.5 seriously around the middle of year 8, then moved to Claude Opus 4.6 when it landed. Most of what I'll say below is from those two models specifically, used inside GitHub Copilot
I was able to 10x-20x my development speed with AI agents.
But I steered the agents in the right direction, supervising and testing everything.
And of course, there were times when I needed to jump in and write code manually.
As well as telling the AI to do parts differently.
What AI did not change
I want to be specific here, because the hype is loud and the reality is narrower.
It didn't change product decisions. No model has told me what to build next. The roadmap still comes from me using the product daily and noticing what annoys me.
AI coding tools are most valuable on codebases you already understand deeply. They amplify your judgment. They don't replace it. If you're new to your own stack, you'll ship faster and dig holes faster.
If you're curious what 9 years of dogfooding looks like in practice, I recorded a video walking through how I personally use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWFATjR77L0
Have your side projects come to life or matured since AI Assisted coding arrived?
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