I'm Not a Developer, but I Built a Startup by Talking to AI

Three months ago, if you’d told me this is how I’d spend my days, it would have sounded insane.

I’m not an engineer. I come from the sales world. My job was talking to people, not writing code.

Now I’m building a company with one other person. I do it on a walking treadmill. I talk to my computer. An AI coding agent writes the code.

Here’s what that looks like in real numbers.

The setup

There are two of us. Me and my co-founder. We’re building a consumer mobile app.

My setup has three parts.

A walking treadmill under my desk. I average 12,000 steps a day.

Willow Voice for dictation. You hold a hotkey, talk, let go, and clean text shows up wherever your cursor is. It works in any app, per Willow’s own help docs.

Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent. You give it a task and it writes, tests, and reviews the code.

That’s it. I walk, I talk, the agent builds.

The numbers

68,571 words dictated
164 words per minute
13 hours saved
an 8-day streak going right now

68,571 words is a lot of talking. That’s me describing features, explaining bugs, and telling an agent what to change.

On the code side, here’s what GitHub shows for the last 30 days:

1,176 commits
287 merged pull requests
475,982 lines added
41,454 lines deleted

I want to be clear about what that means. I didn’t hand-type that code. I described it, mostly out loud, and the agent wrote it. My part was deciding what to build, checking what came back, and saying what was wrong.

Why a salesperson can do this now

Sales teaches you a few things that turn out to matter a lot here.

You learn to explain things clearly. You can’t close a deal if the other person doesn’t understand what you’re offering. Same with an agent. If I’m vague, I get vague code back.

You learn to ask questions until you actually understand the problem. Discovery calls are just that. Working with Codex is the same skill. What is broken? Why? What does the person using this actually need?

You learn to talk fast and think on your feet. That’s the part I didn’t expect to matter. When the bottleneck is talking instead of typing, I’m in my lane.

164 words a minute is just how I talk.

Why a treadmill

Talking to an agent all day means you don’t need to sit still. You don’t need your hands on a keyboard. You need a mic and a screen.

So I stopped sitting.

I’m walking while I explain a feature. I’m walking while I read the agent’s work. I’m walking while I decide whether it’s right.

12,000 steps a day isn’t from a gym. It’s from my workday.

How I got here

This didn’t start three months ago. It started with a side project.

Between June 18 and July 16, I built a daily sports card game called statback with an AI coding agent. 172 commits in a month. It taught me how to work with an agent. It also taught me what breaks when you move fast and real people show up.

I shut it down. Maintaining it was a headache, and it was a side project.

But it changed what I thought was possible. Statback was the practice run. This is the real thing.

What sounded insane three months ago

Three months ago, here’s what I would not have believed:

That someone from sales could run the build side of a startup.

That I’d merge 287 pull requests in a single month.

That I’d do it standing up, walking, talking out loud to a computer.

None of that was on my radar in August. The tools were already out there. I just didn’t know I could use them like this.

What’s still hard

It isn’t magic.

The agent is fast. It’s not always right. It will build exactly what you asked for, even when what you asked for was wrong. Checking the work is still my job. Knowing what the customer needs is still my job.

That’s the sales part. And it turns out that’s most of the job.