Burak Avar

After 3 months of solo building on evenings/weekends, I noticed my 7 9pm block is where ~80% of shipped code lives. Everything else mornings, lunch breaks, weekend afternoons turns into planning, browsing, or half-baked drafts that get thrown out.

Two things I had to change to protect that window: killing all notifications until 9pm, and doing planning the night before so I don't waste the shipping hours on "what should I build today."

Mine was Semrush's Authority Score. It went from 2 to 5 in a few weeks on a side project and I read it as progress.

Then I pulled the backlink list instead of trusting the summary number. 116 referring domains, up from before. The count of real follow links, the ones search engines actually treat as a vote, was exactly 4. Same as three weeks earlier. Not one more.

I build a product mostly on my own, with agents doing a growing share of the mechanical work. This year my output went up and my days got worse, and it took me a while to see why.

Automation ate the typing. It did not touch the checking, and it multiplied the number of things waiting to be checked.

Then I found telemetry that matches: Faros AI looked at two years of workflow data from 22,000 developers across 4,000+ teams. Task throughput per developer up 33.7%. Median time a pull request sits in review up 441.5%. Daily PR contexts per developer up 67.4%.