I forgot why I built half my own projects

The confession

I’ve got a lot of projects on the go. A multiplayer word game that’s actually live, with actual strangers playing it. A trip planner. A couple of mobile apps stuck at “almost.” A little task hub I built to keep track of everything else. Plus a pile of small tools whose names all rhyme, because apparently that’s a thing I do now.

And somewhere in there, I lost the plot. I’d open something I hadn’t touched in a few weeks and just sit there, blank. Why did I build it this way? What was this workaround for? Is this thing even finished, or did I wander off halfway and forget?

Turns out the thing that actually slows me down isn’t hard bugs. It’s forgetting.

So I sent in some scouts

I was never realistically going to re-read a dozen projects by hand. Be honest, who would. So I did the lazy version: I set a bunch of agents loose in parallel, one per project, each with the same dumb little brief. Go read this. Tell me what it is, what it’s built on, whether it’s even in version control, whether there are tests, whether I’m deploying it like a professional or by hand with my eyes shut. And tell me what’s half-finished.

Then I did the same thing on my server, and had the two piles of findings meet in the middle.

First time in months I could see the whole mess at once.

What they found

Some of it was fine! Some of it, less so. A redacted greatest-hits:

A task hub I’d finished, tested, and polished, and then never put a single task into. A very tidy empty room.
A bunch of design tools I’d built for one project and left trapped inside that one project, where nothing else could reach them.
Zero shared memory between my coding sessions, so every session I’d basically re-introduce myself to my own setup.
And the one that actually got me: a couple of things were one fat-fingered command away from losing real work. Not backed up the way I’d assumed. Emphasis on assumed.

None of it was on fire. Which is the trap, really. This stuff doesn’t set off alarms. It just sits there quietly while you’re busy shipping the fun thing.

The part where I felt dumb

I’ll be honest, finding out your live app’s safety net has a hole in it is a specific flavour of stomach-drop. First instinct: feel like an idiot.

But I’ve landed somewhere better than that. The audit found it. That’s the win, the whole win. Everyone building fast leaves gaps; that’s not the failure. The failure is not having anything that goes looking for them. Now I’ve got something that looks. And the scary ones got fixed that same afternoon, which felt a good deal better than the stomach-drop did.

Why I’m writing this down

The audit was the easy bit, honestly. Agents are great at reading things and handing you a report. The hard part, the part I keep losing at, is remembering the why a month later.

So this blog is me writing it down somewhere I can’t lose it. What I built, and why. Some of it’ll be wins. Some of it’ll be me owning an L in public, like this one. All of it is me trying to stop being a stranger to my own work.

If you’ve also got more projects than your brain can hold: how the hell do you keep it all straight? I’m taking notes.

Stay soupy.