Built with Claude Code · a retrospective
Thirty-two days,
eighteen folders
What actually got made — including the parts that didn’t
10 Aug — 10 Sep 2026108 sessions5 live services1 server
Day 1 · 10 August
It started with a PowerShell script.
Someone had a script that swapped certificates in a folder tree. The ask was to turn it into a small Go app with a window and a button.
What that one session cost
185
Messages sent
In a single sitting, across two days.
1session
And then never again
The app was finished. The folder has not been opened since 11 August.
0
Commits
It was never put in git. Most of this month never was.
Exhibit 1 · sessions per week
It did not build gradually
One session is one conversation — opening the terminal, working on something, closing it. The week of 31 August was three new projects starting in the same seven days.
Exhibit 2 · where the time went
Six projects ate the month
Six projects took 100 of the 108 sessions. The other six — a Go app, an MCP server, a proxy check, and three research folders — took eight between them.
Exhibit 3 · the shape
Five kinds of thing, one pipe
The shape only appeared afterwards. Nothing was planned around a gateway — OmniRoute was built on 3 September to cut an API bill, and the older projects were moved onto it the same week.
Live right now, on one box
Four of them answer on a real domain
imagine.alex-breeze-its.me
omniroute.alex-breeze-its.me
spreadwatcher.alex-breeze-its.me
courses.alex-breeze-its.me
The hero · spread-watcher
The one with money in it
It began as a table of price gaps between exchanges. It ended as a bot placing its own trades, with guardrails, shorts, and a scorecard.
11 August → 8 September
35
Sessions
A third of the whole month.
223
Commits
More than the other five repos put together.
3,924
Messages
Most of them variations on one question.
The question, asked twelve different ways
“Check please bot’s latest auto trade. How it’s going, did he get profit? How was reward ratio? Just check, no changes needed for now.”
spread-watcher — 29 August, 06:05
Roughly a third of the sessions on this project changed no code at all. They were someone asking a machine how the other machine was doing, and being told.
Six days · 3–9 September
The fastest thing built all month
28
Sessions in six days
56
Commits
0
Lines written by hand
Imagine — upload a picture, describe a change, get a new picture. Masked editing, model auto-discovery, generation trees, and video. From nothing to deployed in under a week.
The move that paid for itself
Build the toll booth, then reroute the traffic
3 September: an Ansible project that stands up an LLM gateway on the server. Same day, in another window, the trading bot was pointed at it.
01
The bill got noticed
Every project was calling model APIs directly, each with its own key and its own spend.
02
One gateway, infrastructure-as-code
Ansible, a socks5 proxy, admission control, API keys on the public routes. 12 commits in two days.
03
Everything moved behind it
“let’s move our bot to this to spend less money on API calls” — the same afternoon.
The only piece of infrastructure built on purpose
Failure 1 · the one that stayed broken
Ten days, same bug, twice reported
13
13 August
“my latest transfer from gate to bybit failed, can you check why and fix that?”
Six messages. The session ends. Nothing is committed.
23
23 August
“My latest transfer from gate gone wrong. Could you check why and fix that?”
Forty-five messages this time. Same subject line, ten days apart.
The first session was closed before it was finished
A six-message session is not a fix. It is an interruption. The cost of stopping early was paid ten days later, at seven times the length.
Failure 2 · the folders with nothing in them
Six starts that never became anything
01
open-doors-tracker
Created 9 August. Completely empty. Never opened again.
02
saas
One commit on 4 August: a build brief. The brief was never built.
03
website
Contains a config folder and nothing else.
04
proxy-check · some_files · hermes
Nine messages, four XML files, and one research session. Questions that got answered and needed no project.
Cheap to start is the whole pitch. This slide is the invoice for it.
Misunderstandings · verbatim
Four words in, fifty-two messages out
01
“Make a website looking good”
Four words. Fifty-two messages, three screenshots and a design skill later, it looked good. Neither side knew what “good” meant at the start.
02
“it looks cheap now”
The most useful piece of feedback given all month, and completely unactionable until it was shown a screenshot of itself.
03
“I feel myself overcrowded — too much information is there”
The Telegram bot had been answering the question asked, not the question meant, for two weeks.
And the domain itself
Five subdomains live. The front page never got written.
alex-breeze-its.me — captured 10 September
“Success! The alex-breeze-its.me server block is working!”
still the stock nginx page, five weeks on
What it actually cost
Twelve of eighteen projects are not in git.
10,192
Messages sent
Across 108 sessions.
214MB
Of transcript
The only record most of this work has.
24/32
Days worked
Eight days off in a month.
The history of this month lives in a folder of chat logs, not in version control. That is fine until the day it isn’t.
Takeaways
Three things from thirty-two days
None of them are about which model you use.
01
Finish the session, or pay for it later.
The abandoned six-message session cost ten days and a repeat of the same bug. Closing the window is a decision.
02
Show it a picture.
“It looks cheap” went nowhere as a sentence. It went somewhere the moment there was a screenshot to point at.
03
Cheap to start is not free to keep.
Six empty folders and twelve projects outside version control are the price of never having to think twice about beginning.
What would still be standing if the transcripts vanished tonight?