The Exact AI Skills This Solo Founder Uses to Build 5 Apps at Once | Josh Pigford
A walkthrough of Josh's AI skill stack: Plan with /build, review with /adversarial-code-review, force fixes with /but-for-real, and help AI avoid future mistakes with /learnings
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Josh Pigford.
Josh sold his last startup for $4M and is now building 5 products solo with agents. He showed me his exact AI skills stack, including a 4-step /build skill, an /adversarial-code-review skill where he pits Opus against GPT, a /but-for-real skill that makes the AI catch its own mistakes, and a /learnings skill that improves AI’s output over time. Josh has been a solo builder for 25 years and it was fascinating to watch how he works.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Josh and I talked about:
(00:00) Why launching fast beats months of planning
(01:02) A tour of the 5 AI products Josh built solo
(05:22) /build skill: Research, plan, track, implement
(10:52) /adversarial-code-review skill: Getting GPT to review Opus' code
(16:02) /learnings skill: Make AI update its own CLAUDE.md
(16:47) /but-for-real skill: Make AI fix its own mistakes
(19:11) Live demo: How to design non AI slop websites
(28:55) Advice for builders without technical experience
If you enjoyed my chat with Josh, check out his new community for AI builders.
I’m proud to partner with Wispr Flow
There are many AI voice dictation tools out there but I’ve found Wispr Flow to be the most accurate at transcribing words. My kids love using it to dictate to Codex and Claude Code to build games and apps. Try it out with my free link below.
Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode
Keep shipping even though the fear of being embarrassed never goes away. After 25 years as a solo builder, Josh still thinks “It’s terrifying launching something. Every single time it’s just like, what if zero people care?” But he ships anyway: “The idea of spending months working on something before you put it out for other people to use, I think that’s a real bad idea.”
Use Josh’s /but-for-real skill to force AI to check for mistakes thoroughly before pushing a change. Josh finds that the skill surfaces at least 3-5 additional bugs that AI missed each time he runs it. The skill (see snippet above) is hilarious because it bullies the AI to work harder. You can find the full skill to copy at the end of this post and in my new skills library at behindthecraft.com.