72 Hours
A retrospective on building Manifest from first commit to production in seventy-two hours of active development, spread across three weeks of evenings and weekends. What the early posts about this build could not capture was the long middle — the part where the architecture's elegance on paper meets the long tail of problems it implies but does not specify. This piece takes stock of what that middle actually cost, what the tech stack choices were designed to achieve, and what AI assistance genuinely contributed versus what required knowing the domain well enough to make the decisions in the first place.
2 Mar 2026·
Blog