Adopted: 2026-07-05 Status: Active — every new feature is evaluated against this lens.
Bobby is a full software development lifecycle for one person shipping a real project alone — and the way it delivers that is by giving the solo developer a whole team. Not human teammates: a full lineup of agents (planner, builder, peer reviewer, testers, security auditor, QE) that fills every role an engineering org would staff. One human, a full team behind them.
It's not a team tool scaled down — it's a solo tool scaled up, giving a single builder the process discipline of a whole org without the ceremony that only exists because humans have to coordinate. The team is real; the coordination overhead isn't, because there's still only one person to answer to.
- The solo developer building a product on nights and weekends
- The indie hacker running a one-person SaaS
- The non-developer building with Claude Code who needs process, not prompts
- The freelancer juggling several small codebases alone
Teams coordinating multiple humans on one codebase. Bobby has no concept of user accounts, permissions, human handoffs, or capacity planning — and never will. If your bottleneck is people coordinating with people, you want a different tool.
Every feature decision starts from what's different about working alone:
-
No reviewer — so the team is agents. A solo developer has nobody to catch their mistakes. Bobby's review, test, security, and QE agents aren't nice-to-haves; they're the only second pair of eyes — the teammates you don't have. Verification must be automated, adversarial (fresh-perspective agents, never the author reviewing itself), and trustworthy enough to merge on.
-
No standup — so the tool carries the context. Nobody will remind you where you left off. Sessions,
progress.mdresume, ticket frontmatter, and learnings exist so that Monday-you inherits Friday-you's context automatically. Anything that helps Bobby answer "where was I, and what's next?" is core. -
One brain — so ceremony is pure overhead. Team rituals (estimation, approval chains, status reporting to others) exist to synchronize brains. With one brain there's nothing to synchronize. Every command must pay for itself in shipped work; if a step exists only to inform someone else, it doesn't belong in Bobby.
-
Bursty time — so everything must be resumable. Solo work happens in stolen hours. Any workflow, sprint, or agent run must survive being interrupted and pick up cleanly — no long-lived state that rots between sessions.
-
Solo doesn't mean small — so quality is non-negotiable. A one-person project still has production users. TDD, code review, security audits, and post-deploy watchdogs are how a solo builder ships at team-grade quality without a team.
Before building anything, ask:
- Does this serve one person shipping alone, or is it coordination overhead imported from team processes?
- Does it reduce ceremony or add it?
- Does it help Bobby carry context across interrupted sessions?
- Would it still make sense if the project's only human never talks to another human about it?
Two "no"s and it's out of scope.
| Feature | Verdict | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow (plan → build → review → test) | Double down | The automated "team" — principle 1 made concrete |
| Learnings & retros | Double down | Bobby's memory is the solo builder's institutional knowledge |
Sessions & progress.md resume |
Double down | Principle 2 and 4 made concrete |
| Backlog triage & archive | Double down | One brain needs a curated backlog, not an infinite one |
| Dashboard | Keep, solo-framed | Mission control for your parallel agents, not a team board |
| Sprints | Keep, reframed | A batch of related tickets riding one branch — see ROADMAP.md. Mechanics are already solo (one runner, sequential tickets, shared branch) |
bobby assign |
Reframe | Assignment routes tickets to agents, not people |
| Multi-user anything | Out of scope | Accounts, permissions, human review queues, capacity planning |
See ROADMAP.md for the full feature-by-feature pass and what's next.