A markdown convention I wrote to track 5-10 half-built projects without losing my mind, and without another SaaS subscription.
TL;DR. AI made it cheap to generate ideas, draft plans, and start projects. It did not make it cheap to track them. I ended up with 5-10 half-built projects, plan files everywhere, no idea which were stalled vs. blocked vs. abandoned, and no way to explain status to stakeholders or even to future-me. I tried Jira, Linear, Notion, none stuck. I wrote a markdown convention for myself instead: 3 directories, 7-field frontmatter, one HTML dashboard. AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Cursor, Antigravity, Windsurf) read it natively as a side effect. Repo at the bottom.
The new bottleneck
For most of my career, the bottleneck was writing the code. Planning was the easy part. You'd think a feature through, scope it, then spend the next two weeks actually building it.
AI inverted this. I can now scope a feature with Claude in 20 minutes and have a working prototype in an afternoon. That's genuinely transformative. But the bottleneck didn't disappear, it moved.
