Why ctrl+build?
I almost quit coding forever.
After nearly twenty years, the joy was gone. The work felt stale, repetitive, exhausting. Writing another line of code was unbearable. I was done.
Some people refer to this experience as burnout. But this was something else—something much more debilitating. At the risk of sounding far too dramatic, it felt more like an existential crisis. I’d spent years writing code with every keystroke impressing upon me an identity: programmer. Then one day, it was gone. And I spent the next two years struggling to know what to do next.
I didn’t feel like a programmer
My business, thankfully, was humming along, keeping the lights on while I figured myself out.
I explored a few roles:
- Growth engineer
- Engineering manager
- Product manager
- Marketing n00b
It occurred to me that I was completely ignoring the role of “software engineer.” I didn’t feel like a programmer anymore, and the thought of going back to a developer job was a real drag.
These new roles I was looking for were things I worked on day-to-day as a founder on my business. That’s what I love about the job. The ability to jump between roles and keep things fresh is a hard thing to find at someone else’s company.
This need to keep things novel is one reason why so many of us founders are unemployable. Companies like to place people in a box, and while that box has a certain novelty in the beginning, for people like me, it begins to wear off rather quickly.
The reason I couldn’t go back to a developer job was because, for me, being a software engineer was never about the code. I cared more about what I was building—the outcomes, the products, the results.
I was a builder at heart. But I reached a point in my career where writing code was no longer possible. I couldn’t do it, no matter how much I tried. I was paralyzed.
Claude Code changed everything
A friend introduced me to Claude Code. He was excited about it, but I was skeptical. I previously tried Cursor, and while I enjoyed it, I felt like it needed more handholding than I was willing to provide. After a few YouTube videos from Anthropic, I decided to give it a spin. I signed up for the Max plan and set myself up to work on the codebase that runs my business.
I treated Claude Code like a new employee and gave it a simple task for an internal tool. Within the first few minutes of getting started, I knew something was different about Claude Code. It was better at completing work on its own with little handholding.
Before I knew it, the feature was built and the UI looked great. It took ten minutes. I decided to add some extra polish, and a few minutes later, the new feature was built, tested, and in production.
I was blown away.
The code looked good—almost as if I had written it myself. Claude Code matched my coding style to a tee. It did all the grunt work of setting up tests and corrected itself as it ran through the failures. Magical. Using Claude Code felt like pair-programming with a highly capable intern—junior enough to keep me engaged, skilled enough to keep me relaxed.
I felt something changing inside me. I started staying up late again, working through my neglected backlog. It took me one week to get through it all. Nearly two years of neglected work, completed in a single week. Not only was I no longer paralyzed, I was running marathons. From burned out founder, to supercharged builder.
I was hooked.
Excited to build again
I once read a story about Friedrich Nietzsche. Back then, he wrote by hand using pen and paper, but due to illness, he nearly had to give up on writing. He couldn’t sit and focus long enough to write by hand. At his wits’ end, he ordered a recently invented technology: the typewriter. Through this device, he began to write again, ushering a new chapter in his career.
I began to wonder if the same thing was happening to me. I was done, but a technology got me back in the game.
The stark contrast between how I felt then versus how I feel now makes the last couple of years feel even heavier. I can’t help but feel grateful to be building again. These tools make me feel like I did when I was just getting started in this industry.
Only this time, it’s different.
Why ctrl+build?
We’re living in an interesting time. The future feels uncertain, but for experienced builders, it also feels wide open.
Make no mistake: the game has changed. Building today looks completely different than it did yesterday—and it’ll look different again tomorrow. Exploring those differences is what ctrl+build is all about.
This project is my way of navigating the new landscape: building faster, thinking bigger, and rediscovering the joy of code. It’s about what happens when AI takes the drudgery away and leaves you with the fun parts. It’s about what it means to be a builder now, in this new era.
It’s amazing how early we still are. There are no best practices. No conventions. No playbook. The rules are being rewritten in real time. And the only way to truly understand this shift is to participate in it.
In times like these, if you want a seat at the table, you have to help build it.
It’s time to build.