A day in the life of...

TL;DR a day in the life of a founder in build + promote mode.

By the wall clock my day starts at midnight. I'm writing what turns out to be parts of 3 different blogs. Ideas bleed into one another as I type, but it's all grist for the mill. What falls into place by 2AM is the piece I publish on my personal blog, and a second the becomes a LinkedIn post, thorny subject of "keeping your measurements honest".

Bed by 2:30 AM, which is a bit earlier than usual. Awake by 7:30 AM, because 5 hours is all my brain ever allows for. First half-hour is a quiet parse of what's on the table today. Then it's food for the cat and 40 minutes of cardio. Breakfast is a protein shake at the desk, work mode fully engaged. Claude's already researching my project for the day; this one's something from the to-do folder: Delivery Report. It's been simmering for a month, lots of prep work because it touches a lot of things, and is a small part of a much bigger, future build. On its own it's a fair slice of work, and will take the better part of the day to prepare.

But agentic dev isn't a straight line. While research and sub-agents are running, I need to keep busy, so the other half of my attention is on building simulations. Landing multi-step concepts is hard, and complex interactions even harder. Prospective buyers don't have the time or energy to run trials and pack the shelves with enough test data just to assess product fitness, so I'm doing it for them.

We've already got functional mock-ups for time entry and project management, but this is different. That is playground, this is "schema via simulations"; automated (or manual, if that's your thing) step-throughs of key concepts and features. I'm building five of them today, or rather Fable is, but each has to be authentic so there's going to be a lot of fine-tune iteration.

As an aside, this is actually the much harder part of the job, solving the gap between "if you build it" and "they will come". Building is a straight line, formulated, mathematical. Selling and marketing is more like poetry or art. Either it finds an audience, or crickets.

Anyway, lunch has arrived. It's yesterday's leftovers, which is fine ... I like to cook, it's a good way to decompress, but fast is good too. We live in France now and my wife has adopted all the customs, so lunch break stretches until 2PM with a long walk and tour of the back yard. Our veg patch is feeling the autumn bite. No more fresh cucumber for us.

By now the Delivery Report has been well researched by a small army of sub-agents, and they've discovered a few adjacent inconsistencies that I have to sort. A minute turns into an hour, then three as I dig deep to bring order to some legacy code that doesn't quite mesh with more recent changes.

Suddenly it's dinner time and that's another 2 hours prepping air-fried chicken and barbeque zucchini (trust me) and dinner with my partner. Work talk is strictly forbidden.

Eight PM and I'm back at it. The simulations mostly landed, but the invoicing one is a mess. I spend an hour on LinkedIn soft-selling myself and my product as it rebuilds, then check back to make sure the revision has landed. Then it's back to the Delivery Report. I run a LOT of validation on anything this big, and there's a lot of moving parts in the query department ... aggregations, role-based permissions, caching and filtering ... but after a few turns and some intense person-to-AI problem-solving, all is reporting green. I hit build at 11:20 PM (23:20 for my EU brethren).

I'm finishing this up a little late ... it just turned 0:03 ... so I hope you'll forgive the slight stretch. The day's tally is:

• 1 proper blog post

• 2 LinkedIn posts (including this)

• 5 Simulations (3 more to go)

• 1 Refactor of legacy reporting code, unplanned

• 1 New Delivery Report (just finished ... tomorrow will be fine-tuning the result)

The report renders exactly as I hoped. A list of every task completed across all the selected projects, pinned by time range, with pivots along category, user and project, then hours or budget (see the masthead for a screenshot). It's a great way to (nearly) finish up a day.

Living the Founder's life for a product in early release is no 9 to 5, but I'm fortunate in that I love what I do. It's not always so full on, there's the occasional movie night or dinner date, but the above is far more typical. Six workdays a week (and light casual on Sunday) is the cost of choosing to work for myself, of building something big and shiny.

It's 0:08. A few more hours of tweaking the report, maybe a bit of Barry or Rogue One playing on the side monitor, then it's off to bed.

Thanks for spending the day with me.