Restlessness — is it enough?

How long would it have taken me to get to this point with Buildmate without using AI tools? I got this question during a presentation, and I was glad to have gotten it, since I had thought about that myself. I wasn’t even the obvious fit. My current role is as a solution architect, and not as a developer.

What it meant for me was to cross some natural borders for my current role.

The truth is that without the tools available to me now I would probably never have gotten far. To encapsulate everything required for this project in one person would be hard. My way of filling the gap is to work on systems using AI-tools in order to retain control over what was built. Up to this point I had actively written some of the code the project started from. However, as the workflow improved, I could gradually shift to focus on the method instead of writing code.

I see consulting at Hypergene, metaphorically, as being the custodian of a building. It requires experience in order to decide whether to change a roof tile or to redo the whole roof. The core idea is to transfer that hands-on know-how to a system so that any colleague could benefit from it without having to spend months or years training. This makes Buildmate a knowledge-heavy project rather than tech-heavy.

Working with Buildmate was never a task that I was assigned by anyone but, to me, the need for it is obvious.

I found myself getting up early mornings to work on this, almost as something itchy that needed to be attended to. My approach was to pair my experience as a consultant with working on systems using AI-tools. The aim at the time of writing this post is to iteratively improve my general systems for agentic development. This can benefit not only Buildmate but also any future project.

However, where Buildmate, as a project, lands in the end is still unclear.