12 months ago I decided to build a meditation app.
No team. No funding. Just me, some savings, a passion for meditation and the stubbornness to make an app that helps people (and myself) live a more fulfilled life, relax into the present moment and be aware of being aware.
I’d been learning iOS development work for years. I taught myself Swift, SwiftUI and how to code the old fashioned way without AI. Whilst I leverage a lot of AI to write code, this is no vibe-code app and I’m truly grateful for my pre-AI era efforts. I’ve developed a nose for AI slop.
Flying solo isn’t easy. You take on new responsibilities and problems to solve.
Giving yourself permission
The first responsibility I had to take on was giving myself permission and letting go of limiting thinking.
You don’t need a full spec. You don’t need deep technical knowledge. You don’t need someone else to build it for you, or a team to validate the idea before you touch it. You can just start. AI removes an enormous amount of friction between having an idea and having something real.
I’m still working on giving myself that permission. It doesn’t come naturally to me as a designer who now codes. When you’re building something this personal — something tied to a practice you care about, something that carries your name and your point of view — showing it to the world feels different to shipping a feature for a product you’re paid to design and build. In a team the product doesn’t really belong to you. Solo, it does. That’s the gift and the weight of it.
But starting anyway, before it’s ready, before you’re sure — that’s the unlock. And once you start, the process itself starts to change.
The process keeps changing
Once upon a time I used to be a slave to the design process. The old process — research, define, design, handover, build, iterate — wasn’t wrong. It exists for good reasons, especially in teams where alignment and communication need scaffolding.
But alone, it’s too slow and too linear for how building actually feels.
What replaced it wasn’t chaos, exactly. I’d build first and have an actual working app in my hand. Building momentum became my strategy. Small wins stacked. A feature working, a bug fixed, I’d be ‘dog-fooding’ my new updates every morning when I practiced meditation.
The technical walls haven’t completely disappeared. Codex doesn’t always get it right. But the writing code part of the process has stopped being a blocker for me in the way it used to be.
AI as collaborator, not just a tool
This distinction matters more than it sounds.
Using AI as a tool means asking it to do things. Using it as a collaborator means thinking with it and the output is different.
At different moments, AI plays different roles and I act more like a manager. The thing AI gave me that I didn’t have before wasn’t just speed. It was coverage. One person can’t hold every role simultaneously. But with the right collaborator, you can move across them — product thinking, technical problem solving, content, marketing all in parallel.
That said, it’s only as good as your communication and the systems you put in place: scaffolding, constraints, and guardrails. I still review output and I know enough to catch it when it gets too sloppy. Judgment and taste are still needed.
What 12 months actually changed
The technical stuff I expected to learn. The personal stuff I didn’t.
I’m a designer at heart who shifts across roles of product, engineering and design. I’m what you might call a product builder or a generalist. And I’m incredibly grateful to be able to make things for people to live happier and healthier.
The app still hasn’t been launched yet and the work continues. But that’s the thing about building something real — it’s never quite finished in the way a deliverable is finished within a corporate role. It grows in ways a deliverable never could.
If there’s one thing I’d pass on from this journey so far, it’s this: you don’t need to wait until you’re ready, until you know enough, until someone gives you the green light. The permission you’re looking for isn’t coming from outside. It comes from within.
You can just start — and figure the rest out as you go.