Building LADLE with a team of one and a lot of Claude.

LADLE is built and operated by one person, so far. Not because that's a moral commitment; because at current scale the marginal engineer costs more per month than we can absorb without cutting the meal donation. When the math flips, this changes. Here's what the current stack looks like and what actually works.

The stack: Next.js 16 on Vercel, Postgres on Neon (later this year, self-hosted), Stripe for billing, ShareTheMeal API for meal donations, Resend for email. Claude Sonnet via Anthropic API for inference. That is the whole production stack. Zero analytics vendors, zero marketing automation, one auth library (Lucia), one component library (none — everything is hand-rolled with CSS variables from a DESIGN.md source of truth).

Where Claude Sonnet is the specific leverage: (1) writing the copy for every content page on the marketing site, with heavy editing rather than acceptance-of-drafts; (2) reading unfamiliar code in Anthropic's SDK before I extend it; (3) debugging Stripe webhook edge cases by pasting logs and stack traces; (4) drafting the honest cancel flow copy and the trust page; (5) drafting every FAQ, comparison entry, and help article on the site before I edit them.

Where the model is not the leverage: business decisions, pricing decisions, the choice of what to build vs cut, customer conversations that require judgment about who I'm talking to, the actual reconciliation logic for the ledger (I wrote and reviewed every line of that myself), incident response.

The pattern that scales: I use the model to draft, then I edit hard. First drafts from Claude land at maybe 60-70% of shippable quality. The last 30-40% is where the voice lives, and the model can't do that without a specific-enough prompt that it's easier for me to write it.

The parts that still take a specific human: keeping the operating ledger balanced, filing quarterly taxes, having the payment failure conversation with the one card issuer that keeps declining our merchant category code, responding to the four support emails a day that require actual reading (out of maybe fifteen total). Also every legal document. Also every subscribed-but-doesn't-know-what-to-ask user who deserves a personal reply.

The scale question I get asked: at what point do you hire? My honest answer: when the growth rate is fast enough that a specific unshipped feature is losing us more meals per month than a mid-senior engineer's salary would cost. That crossover isn't close. When it is, this page will change.

Nothing about running LADLE this way is heroic. It's a specific set of trade-offs that fit this specific business at this specific scale. Very much not the pattern I'd recommend for a different kind of company.