Replaced by AI. I guess I'm an Indie Hacker now.

My most tech-savvy client chose AI over me. A year later, AI does most of my client work, and we finally have a product of our own.

It was going great. No more corporate mandates, meetings about meetings, arbitrary dates, etc. Until last year, when our most tech-savvy customer decided AI was cheaper and faster than paying me. I hadn’t embraced the AI firehose yet.

I have spent the past year honing my AI skills on customer work and, finally, my own work. The very thing that replaced me has forced the opportunity to build for ourselves.

I’ve run a small software company since 2000. For the last 11+ years, it’s been head down on client work. We still do client work, but it is only a fraction of the workload now.

It was rough in the beginning. We quickly found that AI can write code all night, pass thousands of tests, build great-looking products, but completely fail to actually work, especially when the work is not greenfield or after the first couple of rounds.

So, we have been investing our own time in tools to make our AI process faster and better. I built agent-first, internal tooling to enforce quality standards and workflow. Context, requirements, and past decisions are consumed by an agent that researches the work and writes acceptance criteria; another agent writes the full suite of tests; a different agent writes the code to pass the tests; another evaluates; another fixes; another evaluates that the work is done and all acceptance criteria pass - end-to-end. This prevents agents from writing a database repository or an api or an interface; they now write slices from top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top and have real integration and Playwright tests to prove the work.

I should change my title to Product Micro-Manager. lol

The result: Client work now takes hours instead of weeks. If I need a tool, I build it (I spend way too many tokens doing this).

And now downbad.app is live in production.