Episode 2: I Hired an AI as My Engineering Team

The business's whole engineering organization was, and still is, one AI. This is the decision that made it so.

There was no product yet. No storefront, no code, no catalog. Just an idea for apparel and mugs built around workplace humor, and a name. Standing up an online store with custom products, a publishing pipeline, and a growing catalog is normally a hiring problem. If you don't want to do it all by hand, you need an engineer, probably several. I didn't hire an engineer. I hired Claude, and Claude became the entire engineering organization, starting with the first commit.

That set the division of labor. Research, implementation, testing, and building went to Claude. Business calls, creative calls, and calls about acceptable risk stayed with me. We never negotiated that line. It was the only split that made sense once we were moving. Over time I also leaned on Claude for data analysis and for modeling the likely consequences of my decisions.

Writing code turned out to be the smallest part of the job. Code is fast once someone has decided what it should do and can judge the result. Most of the early effort went into a question that wasn't technical at all: what should the catalog's source of truth be? The answer turned out to be a spreadsheet.

A business that hadn't existed now had a live store, a growing catalog, and an engineering team that never slept, never needed benefits, and never made a creative decision without being asked. Well, almost never.

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