I recently started a side project, and I want to do something I've never done before: build it in public. Not with the daily "Day N" theatrics, but milestone by milestone, with honest write-ups of how it actually went. This is post number one. What's worth writing about isn't the app — it's how I started it. The default move with a capable AI assistant is to ask it to do the work: "set up a Django project with PostgreSQL and Docker." Three months later you're staring at a folder structure you can't justify, a license you didn't think about, and a branching strategy you didn't pick. I wanted to flip the dynamic — the agent surfaces options and documents decisions; I make them. Along the way I picked up a couple of patterns — CLAUDE.md and compound engineering — that I think deserve more attention than they get. This is the first post in a series I'm calling Building We Remember . One long-form article per milestone here on dev.to, shorter updates on X as issues get closed.…