2024 in Review: The Year AI Became My Co-Founder

Every year of building has a theme. 2020 was the year of figuring out product-market fit. 2021 was the year of scaling. 2022 was the year of sustainability. 2023 was the year AI arrived.

2024 was the year AI became my co-founder.

That isn't a metaphor. Across every product in my portfolio, AI moved from an interesting technology I was experimenting with to a core collaborator in how I design, build, ship, and maintain software. The shift was not sudden. It accumulated through hundreds of daily interactions until I realized that my workflow had fundamentally changed.

Here is the year in review.

The Big Bets

Deepening AI Integration Across Products

The single most significant shift of 2024 was integrating AI deeply across my existing product portfolio. Aviation Infinity, ClickAi, and several other products gained AI-powered features that meaningfully improved the user experience.

Building AI features for production products taught me about trust requirements, setting appropriate boundaries for AI capabilities, and the importance of human oversight. The process of watching real users interact with AI features, seeing what builds confidence and what creates skepticism, was invaluable.

The Vertical AI Thesis Strengthened

Throughout 2024, the vertical AI thesis only grew stronger. Every interaction with users in specific domains reinforced that deep, specialized AI products create dramatically more value than broad, general ones. My aviation products proved this out clearly, and the pattern pointed toward exciting future opportunities in other verticals.

AI Tooling: The Unexpected Force Multiplier

Building custom AI tooling and integrations was not in my plan at the start of the year. It emerged as a solution to a practical problem: I needed AI to interact with my systems, not just generate text about them.

The impact was larger than I expected. Custom tooling turned Claude from a conversation partner into a capable collaborator that could actually do things: help manage content, query databases, analyze data. The time saved compounds daily.

The AI Workflow Shift

The bigger story of 2024 isn't any single product. It's how AI changed my entire workflow as a builder.

Design and Research

I now use Claude as a research partner for every major product decision. When I was evaluating the legal tech landscape, Claude helped me synthesize industry reports, identify patterns across competitor products, and stress-test my assumptions. The research was still mine (I directed it, validated it, and drew conclusions from it), but the speed at which I could process information increased dramatically.

Coding

Every line of production code I write is now AI-assisted. Not AI-generated, but AI-assisted. The distinction matters. I don't ask Claude to write features and then paste the output. I use AI to think through architecture decisions, generate initial implementations that I then refine, write tests, debug issues, and review my own code for patterns I might miss.

My estimate is that AI assistance has increased my coding velocity by 40-50%. Not by writing code faster, but by reducing the time I spend on boilerplate, debugging, and context-switching between codebases.

Writing

This blog is proof of the shift. I wrote more in 2024 than any previous year, and the quality is higher because I use Claude as an editor and thought partner. The ideas are mine. The arguments are mine. But the process of turning rough thoughts into coherent essays is faster and more reliable with AI assistance.

Product Management

Managing 9 products requires constant prioritization, context-switching, and decision-making. AI helps with all three. I discuss prioritization decisions with Claude, using it as a sounding board that has context on all my products. It doesn't make decisions for me, but it helps me think through tradeoffs more rigorously.

What I Got Wrong

Not everything about 2024 was a success. Here is what I got wrong:

I underestimated the time new AI features would take. I expected to have more AI integrations shipped by end of year. The research and testing phase took longer than planned because building reliable AI features is harder than it looks. This was the right call (shipping superficial AI features would have degraded the user experience), but it meant other projects got less attention than planned.

I over-invested in AI features for products that didn't need them. Not every product benefits from AI integration. A few of my aviation products got AI features that added complexity without adding proportional value. I've since rolled some of those back.

I was too slow to build AI tooling. I should have built custom AI integrations earlier in the year. The productivity gains were so significant that every month of delay was a month of unnecessary manual work.

The Numbers

By the end of 2024:

• 9 products in active maintenance
• 5 aviation products in the portfolio
• Claude API powering AI features across the entire portfolio
• Multiple AI integrations connecting Claude to my systems
• 10 blog posts written this year

What 2025 Looks Like

Looking ahead, three priorities stand out:

Explore new verticals. The vertical AI thesis is proven. 2025 is the year to take the patterns I've refined across aviation and apply them to new industries where AI can make a real difference.

Build more products. My product velocity has never been higher. With AI assistance and shared infrastructure, I can build and ship faster than ever before.

Deepen AI integration. AI SDK patterns and Claude API integration should be standard across every product in the portfolio. The products that still run without AI assistance should be connected by mid-2025.

The Co-Founder Analogy

I used the phrase "AI became my co-founder" deliberately. A good co-founder doesn't do everything. They complement your strengths, challenge your assumptions, handle tasks you are less efficient at, and accelerate everything by being a second capable mind on the problem.

That is what AI became for me in 2024. It doesn't replace my judgment, my creativity, or my domain expertise. But it amplifies all three in ways that make a solo founder managing a portfolio of products feel less like a juggling act and more like a partnership.

2024 was the year that partnership became real. I am going into 2025 with more products, more ambition, and more capability than I've ever had. And for the first time, I don't feel like I am doing it alone.