Saturday. Day 5. Slight hangover. Been at the computer for three hours. And my co-founder? Just hit me with a warning I know all too well. “You’ve used 90% of your session limit.” As if he’d been drinking last night too.
Two Hangovers, One Couch
There are days when everything clicks. And then there’s today.
I’ve been at the computer since 8 AM — which is already ambitious for a Saturday. But I had this plan: weekend = extra productive. Multiple articles a day. Push the app forward. Conquer the world. Or at least finish the next blog post.
Three hours later: nothing. Literally nothing. My head feels like a browser with 47 open tabs, none of which are loading. And as if that weren’t enough — Claude is flagging too.
See that? My co-founder needs a break. On a Saturday morning. As if he’d had two glasses too many on the couch last night.
What I Accomplished in Three Hours
Honestly?
I asked Claude the same thing three times, each time phrased slightly differently, and got three answers I couldn’t really process because my brain is running on power-saving mode today. I closed the wrong tab twice. Accidentally overwrote a file once (just CSS, thankfully). And once I just stared at the screen for three minutes straight, thinking about coffee.
This is Build in Public. Right here. Not the breakthrough moments. The moments where you realize: today is not your day. And it’s not your AI’s day either.
It doesn’t, obviously. Claude didn’t hit its session limit because it partied too hard — it hit it because I burned through too many tokens in three hours. My hungover brain produces especially long, especially unstructured prompts. The exact opposite of what I learned in Part 2. The irony.
The Takeaway: Off-Days Count Too
I didn’t have to write this article. I could’ve just turned on Netflix and written the day off.
But that’s the whole point of Build in Public: it’s not always a highlight reel. Sometimes you’re sitting at your computer with a mild headache, your AI is showing you warnings, and you write something anyway. Not because you have to. But because real founding looks exactly like this.
Not a new feature every day. Not a breakthrough every day. Sometimes just: I showed up. I tried. And tomorrow will be better.
- Don’t tackle the important stuff on hangover day. Sounds obvious. It’s not, when you’re ambitious.
- Your co-founder mirrors you. Bad prompts = fast limit. Your output is only as good as your input.
- Even a “nothing worked today” day is content. Because honest always beats perfect.
Right. I’m making tea now and waiting for Claude to recharge. Maybe I’ll get something done this afternoon. Maybe not. Both are fine.
Until next time — hopefully with less of a headache.
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“The one building the couch app had a hangover and still sat down at the computer. And her AI had a hangover too — 90% session limit used up. She says he must’ve been drinking the night before too. Nothing worked for either of them. But she wrote an article about it anyway. Kind of endearing, honestly.”
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