It’s going very well.

Experience level: very senior, programming for 25 years, have managed platform teams at Heroku and Segment.

Project type: new startup started Jan ‘26 at https://housecat.com. Pitch is “dev tools for non developers”

Team size: currently 2.

Stack: Go, vanilla HTML/CSS/JS, Postgres, SQLite, GCP and exe.dev.

Claude code and other coding harnesses fully replaced typing code in an IDE over the past year for me.

I’ve tried so many tools. Cursor, Claude and Codex, open source coding agents, Conductor, building my own CLIs and online dev environments. Tool churn is a challenge but it pays dividends to keep trying things as there have been major step functions in productivity and multi tasking. I value the HN community for helping me discover and cut through the space.

Multiple VMs available over with SSH with an LLM pre-configured has been the latest level up.

Coding is still hard work designing tests, steering agents, reviewing code, and splitting up PRs. I still use every bit of my experience every day and feel tired at end of day.

My non-programmer co-founder, more of a product manager and biz ops person, has challenges all the time. He generally can only write functional prototypes. We solve this by embracing the functional prototype and doing a lot of pair programming. It is much more productive than design docs or Figma wireframes.

In general the game changer is how much a couple of people can get done. We’re able to prototype ideas, build the real app, manage SOC2 infra, marketing and go to market better than ever thanks to the “willing interns” we have. I’ve done all this before and the AI helps with so much of the boilerplate and busywork.

I’m looking for beta testers and security researchers for the product, as well as a full time engineer if anyone is interested in seeing what a “greenfield” product, engineering culture and business looks like in 2026. Contact info in my profile.