Kun Chen

Solo builder. Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft, Atlassian.

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

what does it feel like to quit your job and go solo?

it's been just a month since I quit my big tech career as an L8 engineer

i wrote down my experience of this past month in the most transparent way possible. hope it's helpful to fellow builders!

https://t.co/tldUEYrUsi

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@stephendaimler will do!

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

codex is completely down. 403 / 429 on every request

back to claude

having my workflow being fully agent-agnostic pays off almost every day

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@James_Buthuanal this was posted 16h ago and it’s recovered since

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@feifei_qiu exactly

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

more and more people started to talk about "AI makes us busier than ever" and the discussion is becoming more and more misguided

we've always been pretty busy. i grew up watching my grandma wake up 5am and carry the whole family's laundry for half an hour to a river to get them washed before real work starts. my parents regularly work their office jobs 12 hours a day for years and years. i myself had to work 70 hours a week regularly at big tech way before AI

we're not any "busier" - we're just still quite busy. why? with most knowledge work, if we just want to get the same amount of work done, AI can absolutely help us get it done faster and save us time

but what do i do with the saved time? do i go to the beach? every minute i choose to spend at the beach, there are millions of equally smart people who would choose to keep working and prompting AI to get more done. they are going to out-compete me to death unless i come back from the beach and match their hours

we're busy because many people choose to be busy, and we've structured our society to reward business. this has nothing to do with AI. we will continue to be as busy as we can be, unless we fundamentally change how we distribute resources in our society

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@OskarKohler great analogy

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@Yuchenj_UW ha. i actually just made a video fully explaining the whole situation with tokenmaxxing

it’s definitely not very easy to tell what’s happening from the outside

https://t.co/KSn0ErLQXR

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@latrampatv you do need to update

brew update && brew upgrade baby-menu

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

baby-menu v0.1.12 - bunch of bug fixes and reliability improvements since initial release

this is my baby-menu after talking to it for a bit - what would you want as your personal menu bar app?

i'm now getting addicted to this new paradigm of hyper-personal software - an app i can just talk to and shape it into exactly what i want

as i'm getting used to this, i now find it very hard to get back to static apps that were made by other people and work exactly the same for everyone

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

many people told me the background music was distracting so I just removed it and did a re-upload here

https://t.co/KSn0ErLQXR

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

finally made this video to fully unpack the tokenmaxxing game, and the economy behind the AI industry https://t.co/3UWtPRloR5

did my best to explain
- how did tokenmaxxing start
- why companies ask employees to burn tokens
- the capital games being played
- what to do as leaders
- what to do as employees

enjoy! any further questions feel free to post below and i'll try to answer every one

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@ethankongee thanks! i totally agree.. lesson learned

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

different take here

“someone still has to wake up and care 100x more about Product or Design than anyone else”

first of all - that means “anyone else” isn’t doing enough of what they should do

also that’s just like some engineers wake up caring more about frontend than backend, and some more about reliability, or security

i think the titles are strictly harmful at this point - you can’t make a decision until you have a “PM” sign off. you can’t ship the product into a “designer” has looked at it. you can’t merge a fix unless it are an “engineer”

i really hope we tear down those constraints and just look at each individual’s strength and weaknesses and let them do whatever they do best

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@mohn93 to be seen! :)

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

just merged 2026 open source PRs in 2026, close to 5k stars across my projects since i quit my job and started building - you can tell from the chart when that was :)

pretty happy with the solo life so far!

(and if i had this widget earlier i would not have broken my streak...)

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@susuinldn i do think about lost earnings tbh. but.. no pain no gain

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@MohndAlrasheed ty!

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@zilizilix i’m doing the $200 plan on both and often still run out of quota

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@Piyush_Jasaiwal most of the PRs are my own projects :) but i do contribute upstream into dependency projects i use, and that’s usually fixing problems i ran into with using them

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@Piyush_Jasaiwal to be fair it doesn't happen very often

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@tanishqk rich :D

[Kun Chen @kunchenguid]

@andyhtran_ best proof that customers have no loyalty haha