How I Work: My Solo Dev Setup, Time Management, and Running two Companies

A solo episode answering a question I keep getting asked: how do I get through it all?

I walk through my full setup - the dedicated remote Mac that acts as my "local" environment, Droid as my coding harness, Paseo for exploratory work, Cloop for mature codebases, MUXI as my assistant running through Claude Desktop over MCP - plus why I self-host almost everything, and it has nothing to do with saving money.

Then the harder part: how I manage time. My job stopped being doing the work and became deciding which bucket the work goes in. I make 20-30 decisions a day and almost all of them are classifications - rails or agents, automated or human, or time to kill the process entirely. Anything I've done more than a few times gets automated into one of three buckets. Most of my time goes into thinking rather than typing, stripping products back to first principles and deciding what not to build.

I also cover why most of my automations are deliberately gated behind human approval, why I read every line the agents produce, how Automaze actually runs without me, where leads really come from after 15 years of open source, and why I embed myself as the FDE with every new client before handing off.

All of it exists to protect the context in my head. Everything else is scaffolding.

00:00 Welcome and Envapor
00:50 Why My Workflow
02:16 Cloud Local Setup
04:03 Coding Tools Stack
07:26 Personal Productivity Apps
08:51 Self-Hosting Philosophy
09:46 Multi-Agent Workflow
10:35 Time Management Decisions
11:54 Automation Buckets
14:40 Research and Judgment
17:25 Email and Gated AI
19:45 Running Automaze VarOps
20:58 Inbound Leads Flywheel
22:08 FDE Founder Onboarding
25:16 Wrap Up and Newsletter

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This podcast is sponsored by Automaze, the fractional CTO partner for founders and operators. Whether you’re building a high-tech MVP or modernizing internal ops with AI and automation, Automaze can help you scale without the overhead of a full-time team.

Learn more: automaze.io