Possible is Everything: How AI Brought Me Back to Building
Building a production system in a weekend with AI assistance
From Burnout to Building
After 27 years in software—BlackBerry, Akamai, Wayfair, various startups—I climbed the ladder from engineer to director. More meetings, fewer commits. Eventually, I left to become a full-time investor.
The returns were good. Palantir at $9, Google at $90. But something was missing.
While evaluating AI development tools as investments, I tried Kiro. Not as an investor, but as someone who missed building things.
What I Built
One weekend, I built a market intelligence platform:
- Tracks 214 stocks with technical indicators
- Generates AI-powered market commentary twice daily
- Runs Monte Carlo price projections
- Sends professional HTML emails to subscribers
- Costs $0.50/month for 100 users
This would normally take weeks. I built it in a weekend.
How It Worked
Saturday morning: "I need to track stock prices and calculate technical indicators."
Within 15 minutes, I had DynamoDB tables and a Lambda function fetching OHLCV data for 214 tickers from Yahoo Finance. No Terraform files, no IAM debugging.
Saturday afternoon: Added Claude AI to analyze market data and generate institutional-grade commentary. Set up EventBridge to run twice daily.
Sunday: Implemented Monte Carlo simulations in pure Python (no numpy, no Lambda layers) and built the email delivery system with SES.
By Sunday evening, it was live.
The Reality
I still wrote code. Kiro didn't magically generate everything. What it did was remove friction—the thousand paper cuts that make development exhausting.
When I said "create a DynamoDB table," it knew I needed composite keys and proper decimal types. When something broke, I could say "the Lambda is timing out" and get actionable fixes.
The Economics
The entire system costs $0.50/month:
- Lambda: $0 (free tier)
- DynamoDB: $0.09
- Bedrock: $0.14
- SES: $0.20
- S3 + CloudWatch: $0.07
This is a production system with 13,500+ historical records, 20+ indicators per ticker, and 99.9% uptime. For fifty cents.
What Changed
The distance between "I wish this existed" and "here's the URL" has collapsed.
I have a backlog of tools I never built because the activation energy was too high. Now I'm building them. Not because I have more time or got better at coding, but because the friction is gone.
The Point
If you have an idea, the only thing stopping you is starting. Not skill. Not time. Not money.
I built a production system in a weekend after years away from code. If that's possible, what are you going to build?
I'll be sharing more about my journey building tools, investing, and exploring what's possible with AI. Follow along here for updates.
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