Building Squad33 with Squad33
Six and a half weeks of building Squad33 mostly by voice away from the keyboard while the board ran the work: 515 tickets on my own instance, and the honest numbers off the board.
The board I ship from is the board I ship
Squad33 is built on Squad33. There is no second process for the product
itself: a ticket lands in ready, the worker checks it out into a git
worktree of its own, a run happens, a pull request opens, and I read the diff
when I am back at the desktop. Everything on this site got here that way,
including this site.
Squad33 comes with a Stats pane. Here is mine, over the last thirty days.
The first ticket on it is dated the 1st of August. Six and a half weeks later:
515 tickets, 473 of them done, 711 worker runs — 299 of those finished in the
last thirty days alone. Seventy-five percent were done in a single run; 120
came back for a second. One in ten hit blocked at some point and waited for
a decision only I could make, which the pane works out from retry counts
because the board keeps no transition history.
That last third of the numbers is the honest part. A quarter of the work needs another pass, and the board is built to make a second pass cheap rather than to pretend the first one was enough.
Most of these tickets started as talking rather than typing — on a walk, or somewhere in the house nowhere near the keyboard. I cannot put a number on that, and I would rather say so than guess: nothing on the board records whether a ticket arrived by voice, from a phone, or from the desk. Measuring it properly is on the list, and when it is, the number goes in a post like this one with the rest.
Why a walk and not a spec
Most of those started as a discussion rather than a written specification — a conversation on a path, out loud, turned into tickets from there.
Typing has a ceiling I hit every single day: after a few hours my hands are done deciding, and the extra paragraph of detail — the one that turns a vague ticket into a run that succeeds first time — never gets typed. Speaking has no such ceiling. I say the extra paragraph because saying it costs nothing, and the run is better for it.
A voice agent that goes quiet for twenty minutes, or a first turn that takes thirty seconds, are invisible at a desk with the logs open. They are the whole experience with earbuds in, an hour from home.
The board is the other half of it. Describing the next ticket and building the last one happen at the same time, in different places, and neither waits for me to sit down.