Debugging Myself While Debugging Code

Dec 17, 2022

Kodezi didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a flash of inspiration or a weekend hackathon project.
It came together line by line — over years of trial, confusion, rewriting, and scaling.
And so did I.

While I was teaching a machine to understand code, I was learning how to understand myself.
While I was debugging infrastructure and logic trees, I was also debugging my habits, my decisions, and my identity as a builder.

The journey wasn’t parallel — it was the same process.
The product and I were evolving together.


Early Builds, Early Pressure

In the earliest days of Kodezi, the code was fragile. Everything was manual. Models would crash, edge cases would flood in, and I barely had the structure to contain it. There were no clean systems — only motion, stress, and the will to fix things fast.

That’s exactly what I was, too.
I was 17. Still figuring out who I was as a founder, how to speak to investors, how to manage time, how to write a product narrative while still learning how to run a team. I didn’t know what “real infrastructure” looked like — I just knew I had to make something work.

So I brute-forced everything. Pushed code. Pitched hard. Took meetings I wasn’t ready for.
Some things worked. Many didn’t. I rewrote logic and rewrote myself — over and over.


Technical Debt ≠ Personal Weakness

At one point, I realized I had created systems that were running on patches — not just in code, but in life.

I had built habits around urgency instead of clarity.
I had started to equate burnout with progress.
I was trying to fix everything immediately — not because it needed to be fast, but because I didn’t know how to let something rest while I thought it through.

And just like in code, shortcuts created tech debt.
Except this time, the architecture was me.

That realization shifted how I led, how I worked, how I made decisions.
I started slowing down enough to design the foundation before scaling it.
Not just in the product — but in myself.


Refactoring the Way I Think

As Kodezi matured — with more structure, a real engine, integrations, layers of memory and autonomy — I started operating differently too.

I stopped trying to control everything and started designing for resilience.
I built better rituals. Tighter focus. More trust in the system, and less panic over every small bug.

Just like Kodezi was learning from past commits, failed PRs, and broken tests — I was learning from every wrong turn, misread signal, or overreaction.
Kodezi was forming memory. So was I.

I wasn’t just debugging software.
I was learning how to debug the instincts that wrote it.


What I Know Now

You can’t brute-force evolution. Not in a codebase. Not in yourself.
You can only observe, reflect, adapt — and rewrite with intent.

The more I worked on Kodezi, the more I saw my own growth mirrored in its architecture:

  • Early versions ran on speed.

  • Later ones ran on stability.

  • Now, it runs on memory.

And so do I.