I got laid off in March 2026. The day HR handed me the 30-day notice, I had a small panic attack, then opened my laptop and started building things.
Here's the deal: I had 30 days before severance ran out, and I wanted to see how much I could ship with AI tools before the money (and motivation) ran dry. I gave myself a single rule — every project gets a 7-day deadline, otherwise I kill it. I built 6 things. One has real users. One broke in production. Two I never opened again.
This is what happened, in the order I built them.
1. AI Buddy (Chrome sidebar) — shipped, 15 users
A Chrome extension that puts an AI assistant in a sidebar. Select text on any page, hit a keyboard shortcut, it goes to the AI, reply shows up without you leaving the page. Works with GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek. No login, no credit card.
Time: 11 days (April 1–11).
Status: Live on Chrome Web Store. 15 real users as of June 28, 2026. Rating 4.2.
What I used AI for: 90% of the code (500 lines of JavaScript, written in Cursor). The README, the Chrome Web Store description, the marketing tweets — all AI-drafted, then I rewrote the parts that sounded like AI.
What went wrong: The first version had a Stripe integration. AI wrote 90% of the webhook signature verification. I had to rewrite it from scratch. Also the model-picker UI went through 5 revisions because AI kept proposing what looked right but didn't work.
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