Get Camino build log · 3 of 10
The walking skeleton
Ugly, seven obligations, nothing you’d screenshot — but connected end to end on day one. The oldest discipline I know, and the one AI makes more important, not less.
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Interview
Seven obligations. A barely-styled page. Nothing you'd screenshot.
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Profile → engine
A deterministic engine turns the answers into a plan.
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Plan
Personalized, connected, real — every seam forced open in week one, not week six.
The first version of Get Camino would have failed every design review I’ve ever run.
Seven obligations in the catalog. A barely-styled plan page. Nothing you’d screenshot for LinkedIn.
But it did the one thing no beautiful demo does: it ran end-to-end. Interview → profile → deterministic engine → personalized plan, all connected, on day one. A walking skeleton.
This old discipline matters more with AI, not less. An AI coding agent will happily polish disconnected pieces forever — gorgeous screens with no data behind them, a clever engine no interface can reach. Ask for impressive and you’ll get impressive, in fragments. Demos are cheap now. Integration is where the truth lives, and a skeleton forces every seam into the open in week one instead of week six.
The payoff compounded. Every milestone after the first — the 60-obligation catalog, Lola the AI guide, localization, the mobile apps — was an organ transplanted into a living body, not a part bolted onto a pile. When something broke, it broke inside a running system that told us where.
Was day one perfect? Claude image-searched a hero photo of Spain for the landing page — and confidently shipped a picture of a kitten. Labeled “Madrid.”
The typing was free. Noticing the cat was my job. That’s the whole series in one bug.
The question for an AI-accelerated team isn’t “what have you built?” It’s “what runs end-to-end today?”