Three months ago, my entire task-management system was a chat window I'd lose when the tab closed. Today it's a Postgres backlog that three different coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Grok — pull work off autonomously, stamp with attribution, and close against git history. I never decided to build a project-management system. I just kept hitting a wall, patching it, and hitting the next one the patch exposed.
There's a clean way to read the whole arc, though, and it comes down to a single variable: where the plan lives. Watch that, and every step makes sense — including why you probably want to stop well before the end.
The setup
I run a self-hosted personal data platform called Nexus, on a 128GB Strix Halo box named Furnace, surrounded by ~100 repos: MCP servers, ingestion pipelines, iOS apps, content tooling. My execution tools are Claude Code and Codex CLI. The work is bursty — during one 35-day stretch in spring I shipped roughly 557K lines across those repos — and that throughput is the pressure that broke each planning approach in turn. At a calmer pace you'll hit the same walls later, but you'll hit them.
Phase 1: The plan lives in the chat (mid-to-late March)
