Greenfield: 72 hours
Delete the old product, redesign the whole surface, and rebuild the build process itself: three moves in three days.
The reckoning said what to build. The next 72 hours decided how: three moves, one per day, that set the shape of everything since.
Move one: delete, don’t migrate. v2 had no users to protect yet, which turned a painful question into an easy one. Rather than carefully migrating the old product to the new model, I deleted v2’s product layer outright and kept only the foundations (the greenfield decision, ADR-012: it cut the delivery plan from roughly fourteen weeks to ten).
Move two: design everything at once. A day-long design sprint generated the entire new interface before any of it was built, every screen of the five-mode product, sketched and iterated in one continuous pass (a 530-line design brief handed to Claude Design, producing 55 HTML wireframes and 9 stylesheets; the old workbench UI was archived the same day).
Move three: rebuild the builder. The most consequential one. With one person owing a large product on a launch clock, the process itself became the system: the repo’s instructions were rewritten into an iteration loop, an AI coding agent reads the backlog, picks one unblocked item, builds it, tests it, verifies it, ships it, and exits; the next agent picks up where it left off (backed by a backlog file, per-item work briefs, and an append-only notes file agents leave for each other). Less heroics, more relay race.
The tension it created. A big surface, a solo builder, and high velocity, which is exactly the mix that produced the one real crisis, an era later.
Next era: Building v3