Cross-posted from Shipped With AI, my build log about learning to ship small tools with AI coding assistants. This particular post is about the system behind that site itself, so I wanted to share it here too. Originally published August 25, 2026, as the fifth post on the site.
Status check, up front: I currently run three small projects this way — a Japanese-language blog, a subscription pitch to help local shops keep their online product listings updated, and this English site. All three have made exactly $0 so far. This post is about the system, not a success story.
The first four posts on that site were about specific tools I built: a pricing calculator, an image/PDF processor, a product catalog for a local shop. This post is different. It's about the thing that decided I should write those posts in the first place — and, in a fairly literal sense, wrote this one too.
This isn't a metaphor
I use Claude Code, an AI coding tool, for more than writing code. Inside the same project, I've defined seven separate roles as "subagents" — each one is a written instruction file that tells that role what its job is, what it's allowed to decide on its own, and what it has to check with me on. The seven roles are:
