Most of what I’ve built nobody has ever seen.

Projects that started on a Saturday and ended two Saturdays later because I figured out the thing I was trying to figure out and there was nothing left worth finishing. Experiments that answered a question and produced nothing deployable. Code that lives in a local folder with a name I’ll probably remember and a readme I definitely didn’t write.

None of it counts by the metrics most people use to measure building.

All of it counts by the metrics that actually matter.

What Gets Left Behind

Every project leaves a residue.

An instinct about where a certain type of system breaks. A pattern you’ve seen before. A mistake you won’t make again in the same way — you’ll make a new version of it, which means you’re making progress.

The Hive Mind left me understanding how LLMs collapse toward consensus when you don’t fight it. The SC2 bot is leaving me understanding how hard it is to translate strategic intent into executable action — a problem, I’ve noticed, that shows up everywhere. Not just in games.

You don’t know what a project is teaching you while you’re building it. You find out later, when something clicks in a different context.

That’s the compounding.

The Invisible Curriculum

There’s a version of learning AI that happens through courses, certifications, structured programs.

And there’s a version that happens through building things that break in ways nobody prepared you for.

I’ve done both. The second one stuck.

In real implementations, the gap between what you understood theoretically and what you encounter practically is always larger than you expected. The only way to close that gap is to have encountered it before — in a context where the stakes were low enough that the failure was educational instead of catastrophic.

Weekend projects are that context.

Low stakes. High learning. No audience required.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Building things nobody sees teaches you to build for yourself first.

Not for likes. Not for users. Not for the launch post.

For the answer to the question that wouldn’t leave you alone.

That’s a cleaner motivation than most. It doesn’t require external validation to sustain. It doesn’t stop when the feedback stops.

It just keeps going. Saturday after Saturday.

Most of it invisible. All of it building toward something.

Even when — especially when — you’re not sure what that something is yet.