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What One Person Can Build Now

AI Building Productivity

Something has changed.

A year ago, building a searchable content library from 830 articles would have been a three-month project with a team. Last month, I did it in a week. Not because I worked harder, but because the tools are different now.

I’ve spent fifteen years building products. First at an innovation consultancy serving Fortune 500s, then as a founder growing a wellness brand to $12M in sales. I know what projects used to cost in time, money, and coordination overhead.

That’s what makes this moment so weird.

The Old Math

Here’s how a typical product used to break down:

  • Strategy & scoping: 2-4 weeks with multiple stakeholders
  • Design: 4-8 weeks for research, wireframes, visual design
  • Engineering: 8-16 weeks depending on complexity
  • Content: Running parallel, usually the bottleneck
  • QA & launch: 2-4 weeks of polish

A “simple” product was a six-month commitment. A complex one could take a year or more. And that’s assuming you had the team already assembled.

The New Math

Now I can ship a working prototype in a day. Not a mockup. A functional product that real users can interact with.

The I Ching Oracle I built recently? That’s a $15-20K project by traditional estimates. Interactive animations, all 64 hexagrams with interpretations, changing line logic. I built it in a few days of focused work.

AI isn’t replacing me here. It’s letting me do things I already knew how to do, just way faster.

What Actually Changed

Three things converged:

1. Code generation crossed a line. I can describe what I want in plain English and get working code back. Not perfect code, but code that works. Code I can iterate on. It gets me 80% of the way there.

2. Design systems matured. Tailwind CSS, component libraries, and established patterns mean I’m not reinventing visual language every project. I can focus on the unique parts.

3. Content became computable. I can process, analyze, and transform thousands of documents. What used to require a team of researchers is now a few hours of prompt engineering.

So What

If you’re a founder with an idea stuck in your head, the math is different now. You don’t need to raise money to build a prototype. You don’t need to hire an agency.

If you’re a practitioner with expertise, a doctor or therapist or consultant, your knowledge can become a product faster than ever. That book you’ve been meaning to write? It could be an interactive tool by next month.

The bottleneck isn’t execution anymore. It’s taste. It’s not “can we build this?” but “should we, and what should it look like?”

What I’m Doing About It

I’m taking on projects that would have been impossible a year ago. Not because I’m smarter or working harder. The leverage just changed.

The Rosewoman Library. The Stone Research Foundation database. Tools for practitioners who have ideas they can’t quite articulate yet.

If you’ve got something you want to make real, the barrier is lower than you think.