December: 176 Commits and Zero Lines of Code
Building hit harder than gaming.
I’ve always loved games. Progression systems, optimization, the flow state of getting good at something.
Lately I’ve been shifting that time to building products. Not out of discipline—building just started hitting the same way.
The December Numbers
176 commits across 6 products. An enterprise AI assistant. A social media automation platform. A shared infrastructure library that didn’t exist three weeks earlier. Website, documentation, research.
Not a hackathon sprint. Sustainable pace, proper architecture, tests, docs. The kind of output that used to take quarters.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t write a single line of code. I described what I wanted. An AI agent wrote it, ran it, debugged it, iterated. I reviewed, redirected, approved.
Why It Feels Like Gaming
Games are engineered for dopamine. Complete quest, get reward. Level up, unlock abilities. Optimize your build, watch the numbers go up.
Software development never worked like that. You’d have an idea, then spend hours just writing out syntax. Most developers only know one slice of the stack—frontend or backend or infrastructure—not everything you need to ship a complete product. Even if you have all the skills, it takes time. And that time is enough for your motivation to fade, for the dopamine to disconnect from the original spark.
By the time you ship, you barely remember why you were excited.
And even if you could stay focused through all of that, the scope of what you could realistically build was limited. Big ideas got scoped down to what one person could actually type out.
Now:
- Have idea → describe it
- AI implements → 2 minutes
- It runs → works
- Next idea → iterate
The gap between “I want this” and “this exists” collapsed. Days became minutes. That’s the same loop games have. Fast enough to stay in flow. Fast enough that the thing you imagined materializes before you lose interest.
But This Is Real
Here’s what games can’t replicate: the progress compounds.
Level up in a game, the achievement lives in that game. Ship a feature, it exists in the world. People use it. It makes money. Yesterday’s work makes today easier.
Games simulate progress. This is progress.
The Hours
Holiday break, I was putting in long days on this. Not because anyone made me. Because I couldn’t stop.
That’s the tell. Voluntarily spending leisure time on what used to be work. Not because the work changed. Because the friction disappeared.
What I Actually Built
Nova Assistant - Enterprise AI assistant backend. PostgreSQL, pgvector RAG, agentic workflows. Complete.
Herald - Social media automation. Live in production, suggesting tweets, human-in-the-loop approval via Slack.
wildpines-core - Shared platform library. RAG infrastructure, prompt framework, MCP server. Didn’t exist three weeks ago.
Plus website updates, blog system, documentation, research synthesis.
All running. All real. All built by describing what I wanted and reviewing what came back.
The Point
The tooling finally got good enough.
For decades, the creative part of software—“what if we built this?”—was bottlenecked by the mechanical part. Now the creative part flows directly into reality.
Games didn’t get worse. Building just got that much better.
We’re building AI tools at Wild Pines. Turns out the best way to avoid burnout is making work feel like play.