Today was the first day that felt less like tinkering and more like building something with actual scope. I’ve been calling it Gym OS — software for managing a gym, a domain I know well enough to have real opinions about. I had a plan drafted from the night before and spent the day executing on it.

A more complex Railway deployment

The Railway setup today was meaningfully more involved than anything I’d done before — two separate frontends, one for staff and one for members, both connected to a shared PostgreSQL database. Getting that architecture deployed meant dealing with DevOps questions that go beyond what Claude Code handles in the terminal: environment configuration, service relationships, how the pieces talk to each other across Railway’s infrastructure. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t show up cleanly in a chat session but takes real time to get right.

Approval fatigue on mobile

The mobile workflow hit a wall today, and I think I understand why. The remote Claude Code session generated a lot of chained outputs — test runs in particular — and each one required an approval. In practice that meant I was spending most of my time tapping through confirmations rather than actually reviewing anything meaningful. It felt like clicking next on an incremental game.

The frustrating part is that a lot of those approvals were for test runs that could have just written output to a file for me to review later, rather than piping it somewhere that triggers another permission prompt. I got through it, but it’s a workflow problem I want to solve before the next session rather than just tolerate.

Tests I haven’t verified yet

The agent wrote a set of tests and health checks as part of the build, which I need to actually read. For all I know some of them are just returning true regardless of the state of the service — that’s the kind of thing that looks like coverage and isn’t. Verifying those by hand is on the list, and it’s a good example of why I can’t just treat agent output as correct because it ran without errors. The code compiles and the tests pass, but that’s not the same as the tests being meaningful.

Watching software get built fast

Coming from a background of writing code by hand, the pace is genuinely strange to witness. The architecture I put together today — separate frontends, a real database, health checks, unit tests — would have taken days to weeks depending on how carefully it was being built. Watching an agent scaffold that in a session, even accounting for the approval friction and the verification work still ahead, is a different experience than I expected.

It doesn’t make the verification less important. If anything it makes it more important, because the volume of generated code outpaces what I can carefully read in the same session. But it does change what’s possible as a solo developer, and I keep coming back to the same thought: this is a tool worth learning well, because the gap between someone who uses it deliberately and someone who doesn’t is only going to grow.