As we start 2025, it's never been faster to get a SaaS product off the ground. The frameworks, vendors and tools available make it possible to build in weeks what would have taken months or years even just a couple of years ago.

But it's still a lot.

Even when we start from a base template, we still need to figure out our data model, auth, deployment strategy, testing, email sending/receiving, internationalization, mobile support, GDPR, analytics, LLM evals, validation, UX, and a bunch more things:

This morning I launched bragdoc.ai, an AI tool that tracks the work you do and writes things like weekly updates & performance review documents for you. In previous jobs I would keep an achievements.txt file that theoretically kept track of what I worked on each week so that I could make a good case for myself come review time. Bragdoc scratches my own itch by keeping track of that properly with a chatbot who can also make nice reports for me to share with my manager.

But this article isn't much about bragdoc.ai itself, it's about how a product like it can be built in 3 weeks by a single engineer. The answer is AI tooling, and in particular the Windsurf IDE from Codeium.

In fact, this article could easily have been titled "Use Windsurf or Die". I've been in the fullstack software engineering racket for 20 years, and I've never seen a step-change in productivity like the one heralded by Cursor, Windsurf, Repo Prompt and the like. We're in the first innings of a wave of change in how software is built.