The apartment goes quiet around 9pm.
Both kids finally asleep. Dishes done. Toys cleared (again). That ringing silence when the chaos settles and the evening becomes yours.
I open my laptop. And something wakes up.
I’ve always built things. Just not consistently. Projects would start with excitement, then stall. Half-finished repos. Ideas that never left the notes app. Some shipped, most didn’t. The pattern was familiar: high energy at the start, slow fade, move on to the next thing.
I wasn’t disconnected from building. I was exhausted. The days took everything. Work, kids, logistics, the invisible mental load of keeping it all running. By the time the apartment went quiet, I had nothing left for deep work. So I’d read. Plan. Tinker with ideas on paper. Play games. Comfortable activities that felt productive but weren’t. A form of procrastination against actually making things.
The builder was still there. Somewhere. Just buried under everything else.
A few weeks ago, I took a break from work.
The mental fog lifted. Evenings stopped feeling like recovery time and started feeling like my time. Real time. Time I could use.
Instead of planning, I started making things.
Small experiments at first. Then less small.
I went down the Claude Code rabbit hole.
First just using it. Then optimising how I used it. Then learning from the community, tweaking workflows, understanding what was possible. Each iteration made the next one faster.
I used to think building required long stretches. And that belief was valid, from memory of a pre-AI world. Weekends locked in, four-hour flow states, the kind of uninterrupted time that parenthood simply cannot afford. But this tool lets me work in fragments. Twenty minutes after dinner. Fifteen while the laundry runs. An hour after the kids sleep.
Each session picks up where the last one left off. The context holds. Progress compounds.
Suddenly I was shipping things that would have taken me weeks before. Or more honestly, things I would have abandoned before.
Then, out of the blue, Lenny Rachitsky dropped transcripts for all episodes of his podcast. Lenny runs one of the most respected podcasts for product managers, interviewing leaders from Airbnb, Stripe, Figma, and dozens of other companies. I used to listen to his episodes in the quiet of the night, jotting down notes in the dark.
I saw the files and something clicked. A shape in the chaos. I parked everything else and started building, with a tight scope in mind.
One fragmented evening later, the site existed. LennyDistilled.com. A way to browse PM insights and the quotes that make them stick: by theme, by where guests agree and disagree, by episode, by guest, always traceable back to the source. Verbatim quotes. Timestamps. A reflection of what my own notes from his podcasts looked like, now structured for anyone to explore.
The design came from somewhere unexpected. My grandmother had a small hardbound book of quotes from the Gita in her bedroom when I was a child. Palm-sized, floral cover. You’d pick it up, flip through a few pages, put it down. Some quotes made you think. Others stayed with you for years.
I didn’t plan to reference that memory. But there it was, shaping every decision. Minimal. No chatbots. No AI summaries stripping nuance. Just insights you can pick up and put down. Maybe one stays with you.
Here’s the part I didn’t expect: building became almost addictive.
I shipped in less than a day. Over the following two days, I obsessively iterated. Nearly 40 deployments.
Too many ideas now. Too many projects calling for attention. The constraint isn’t energy anymore, it’s focus. I went from too tired to build to too excited to choose.
I’m still figuring out which threads to pull. Working on everything is its own kind of distraction.
But the builder is awake again.
That’s the thing worth noting. Not the projects. Not the output. Just this: the part of me that makes things isn’t buried anymore. It surfaces in the quiet, after the kids sleep, when the apartment goes still.
I forgot how much I missed it.