One year ago today

One year after being laid off from Indeed while on paternity leave, a developer published four books, built a SaaS product, and created 123 project folders, using AI to accelerate learning and productivity. The developer, who remained unnamed, launched CarerNotes for domiciliary carers and a knowledge base called cce, among other projects, and now advocates for building with AI despite maintenance costs.

One year ago today, 18 August 2025, I was let go from Indeed while on paternity leave. It is a cliché to say it was the worst and the best thing that happened to me. Best only in hindsight. Worst at that moment, with a three-month-old baby. The market was a terrible time to find a job, and I was exhausted, mentally and physically. I did not land a job until February 2026. I did not let that stop me. A lot has changed since August 2025, especially with AI. I was fortunate, in one sense, to be on the outside when it happened. I got to sit with it before most people had even noticed. I published four books. Building Your Own Roguelike: A Practical Guide . A roguelike built from scratch in Ruby. Modular Rails: Architecture for the Long Game . Rails architecture and Rails engines. Filed Under No One: A Registry File . The novel. The AI-First Landlord: An Operating Manual for UK Landlords in the Renters’ Rights Era . For UK landlords, written for the law as it is now. I built my own pipeline to make them. Quire takes Markdown and turns it into a print PDF, an EPUB, a DOCX, and a web edition. It is becoming a SaaS. I started a business while unemployed. CarerNotes https://carernotes.uk is for domiciliary carers: they record a visit by voice, and AI turns it into CQC-compliant notes. I built the product, the billing, the infrastructure, and the marketing site. I started my own knowledge base for AI business context, cce. I wrote it in Rust, for portability and speed. Do I know Rust? Barely. Enough to know what was built, and why. I built Filed Under No One https://filedundernoone.uk as a game as well. I did my own research, and built it in TypeScript with real game editors. It runs in the browser. You can plug in a gamepad, not just a keyboard. I improved the SEO on this site so the work can actually be found: titles, descriptions, sitemaps, share cards. I used a local LLM to process thousands of Portuguese recipes into a kitchen I can actually search. I wrote my own compound engineering system, firm /presentations/firm/ . Think of it as the superpower skills everyone has heard about in software engineering, except I actually built the thing. I even used AI to write replacement firmware for the iPod Classic, in Zig. ZigPod. Do I know Zig? About as well as I know Rust. I reverse-engineered games. I built my own. I wrote books. I wrote posts like this one. I educated myself further in one year with AI than I could ever have imagined. I also help online, on questions I know the answer to, or ones I am curious enough to sit with. Either way, it is a chance to learn something. I counted this morning. Every project directory on this machine, including the archive. One hundred and twenty-three folders. Seventy-seven of them already put away. That number is not a score. Not all of them are products. Some are interviews. Some are dead ends. Some I put away on purpose. Most of them taught me something and then stopped. Starting is cheap now. Finishing, and then living with what you finished, is the work. I have always wanted to create my own things, my own solutions. You still have to weigh building against buying. Building has become cheaper. Maintaining what you build is a different story. So yes, when people say you can be productive with AI, I have been. Sometimes too much. I am still eager to learn, and I will take the extra time where most people will not.