I’ve spent nearly seven years documenting how we built Fathom: outages, DDoS attacks, migrations, $100k AWS savings, my cofounder’s retirement, and a divorce. I write transparently because I want other people to learn from my mistakes. These 18 posts tell the story:

I gave the same audit prompt to Opus fast mode on Cursor and Conductor with my Claude subscription powering it. I paid Cursor $3.61, which is API pricing, but the audit was finished in 2 minutes. Conductor was still going after 16 minutes. Cursor caught everything. Time is money.

I have Cursor Ultra, Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Plus. The only harness that gives me a flow state is Cursor. You pay API pricing to move rapidly and the harness is absolutely top tier. But if you're happy with your current setup, don't try Cursor, because you'll be hooked.

Last night I asked ChatGPT to build a replacement for an app I pay $10/month for. I wanted to build out some features specifically for my use case. Today I woke up and checked it, it was the perfect clone. Then I decided that this project was a waste of my time and deleted it.

What should a junior software engineer do in 2026? Learn. You have an infinite supply of educational resources. Learn to prompt, make mistakes, ship things, break things, get hacked, and document your journey. When I had my first job interview at 17, I had shipped 20+ projects.

I don't know enough about cybersecurity to comment but I do know about DevOps. I think that the bar has risen for entry into every role and that we may see the return of the full-stack software engineer who does everything.

Resisted adding AI to Fathom for a long time because I was concerned about the added cost. We launched our new AI chat feature (for support & analyzing data) two weeks ago and the grand total is $35.69 and 20% of that was from our beta testers. The real cost was my resistance.

We receive 10 spam emails for every genuine customer support email. Those spam emails bypass Help Scout's filter. The only way to fight against this attack is to use AI for defence. I built a spam filter in one hour and I'm shocked that a $35 million ARR company can't solve this.

Reminder: Add team functionality to your project at the start, not 8 years into it. This refactor will be fun 😅

I said that I'd never join another social network again but I made an exception.

We are ahead of Anthropic because 100% of my code is written by AI.

99.3% of the people telling you that “distribution is the only moat remaining” have never distributed anything except that opinion.

Stop blaming AI when it breaks or deletes things. YOU are responsible for the code you ship.

Today I built new infrastructure to handle analytics ingest, new infra & code for debugging site installs for customers, upgraded our data model (extensive benchmarking) and launched infra for a new marketing tool. In the past, this would've taken weeks. What a time to be alive.

Tell me you haven’t used Cursor on fast mode without telling me you haven’t used Cursor on fast mode.