One evening, three projects, and an afterthought.
This wasn't planned. I spent an evening half-watching TV and pottering around the house, asking Claude for help on a few side projects whenever something occurred to me: a fix here, a new feature there, a change of mind or two.
Only near the end did the question pop into my head: how much did we actually get done tonight, and how long would that have taken one experienced person working on their own? So I asked Claude to go back through the evening's sessions and work it out.
What got done
Three projects, worked on side by side. Times are approximate (UK time).
A desktop app for tidying duplicate photos
≈ 22:30 – 23:50- Six releases of a Windows app I'm building to find duplicate photos and videos and decide which copy to keep
- Review duplicates in batches, then several groups on screen at once, with a single “confirm all and next”
- A smarter keep rule: keep the largest copy, preferring a folder named with the photo's date and a subject or place
- Zoom in and out, plus “fit to window”, and a reworked layout that gives the photos more room
- A few Windows quirks fixed along the way (my user folders live on a different drive)
Petunia and I — the music site
≈ 00:25 – 01:10- A researched news post on a US appeals court ruling about fair use and AI training, with its cover image
- Repaired the latest release's pages: player, share previews, navigation and homepage card
- Spotted that a share-title bug affected 20 posts, not one, and fixed them all together
- Traced a repeat breakage to the tool that publishes new releases, and fixed it again
- Advice on whether to add a simple admin form for posting (yes, but with version control kept behind it)
WEYER.TV — this site
≈ 00:45 – 01:45- A complete second version of the site, “Fun side of life”: rewritten copy, homemade memes and illustrations, with a switch to flip between them
- Moved that switch out of the navigation and explained it better, after
it doesn't really indicate what it does
- A DW favicon, then redrawn after
the font looks a bit comical
- Projects updated: PatchSure added, and InteliAutoComplete marked as paused, with the reason
- This Lately feed and links to my social profiles
The estimate
How long one skilled, senior person might take to do the same work properly: design, build, test on desktop and mobile, release and support.
| Workstream | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicate-photo app: six releases, Windows fixes, packaging, support | 20 h | 30 h |
| Petunia and I: news post, release-page repairs, 20-post fix, advice, docs | 8 h | 12 h |
| WEYER.TV fun mode: concept, theme, copy and jokes, illustrations, code, testing | 20 h | 30 h |
| WEYER.TV follow-ups: switch redesign, favicon, projects, notes feed, social links | 11 h | 18 h |
| Research, reviews and releases | 3 h | 4 h |
| Total (best estimate ≈ 75–80 h, about two working weeks) | ≈ 62 h | ≈ 94 h |
The skills it called on
24 distinct skills, which would normally mean around 12 different roles.
What I took from it
- My job wasn't typing; it was directing. Deciding what mattered, saying it clearly, looking at the result and correcting course. Most of my messages were a sentence or two, often half-formed.
- That's product ownership. Knowing what good looks like and communicating it well has always been the core of agile delivery. With AI doing the making, it becomes most of the job.
- Judgement still matters. Several of the evening's best moments were course corrections: “that switch isn't part of the navigation”, “the font looks comical”, “it wasn't a planned experiment”. The work got better because someone was paying attention, even if only half of it.
- Multitasking isn't the lesson. I'd normally coach people out of it. The interesting part is how far a little clear direction goes when the doing is cheap.
How the estimate was made. Claude reviewed the evening's session transcripts, listed every request and change, and estimated the hours one experienced professional would need for each, including design, testing and release but not meetings or handovers. It's an informed estimate, not a measurement, so treat the numbers as a range, not a fact.
It covers only the coding sessions Claude could see that evening. Anything I did in other chats isn't counted.