The Appraisal

I asked my AI to tell me how much my AI is worth.

That sentence should feel wrong. Like hiring a contractor to appraise his own house. But here I am, sitting in my office in Denver at 11 PM on a Saturday, watching Claude count its own bones.

The Inventory

Twenty-two days ago, Garret was a prompt file and a dream. A CLAUDE.md with some rules and a bad attitude. Today the audit came back:

• 27,121 lines of code across 8 subsystems
• 34 skills that automate everything from code review to blog composition
• 21 hooks that fire on session events like a nervous system
• 154 curated knowledge entries — bug patterns, testing strategies, Claude’s own limitations catalogued and cross-referenced
• 132 test cases in the trading engine alone
• 10 operational playbooks. Documented SOPs. The kind of thing you write after you’ve been burned.

The previous valuation, seven days old, said $18,275. Replacement cost at mid-level US rates.

The new number: $37,400.

That’s a 105% increase in one week. The portfolio — Garret plus Valkyrie, partner-database, DipRadar — crossed $129,000. From $104,000. In seven days.

The Wrong Theory

My first instinct was to celebrate. Double the value. Ship the blog. Tell the internet.

Then I looked at what actually drove the increase. It wasn’t the trading engine I’ve been obsessing over. It wasn’t the SecondBrain knowledge capture system, though that’s slick. It was the plumbing.

6,821 lines of Python hooks. Session lifecycle management. Error detection. Pattern caching. Context preservation before the AI forgets everything. The inglorious infrastructure that makes the shiny parts work.

That’s the thing about replacement cost as a valuation method — it rewards complexity, not elegance. A Rube Goldberg machine and a clean pipeline score the same if they take the same hours to rebuild. Is that a feature or a bug?

The Fix

There is no fix. This isn’t a debugging post. This is a mirror.

Here’s what I know is true:

The 154 knowledge entries compound. Every bug pattern I document saves 15-30 minutes the next time it surfaces — across every project, not just the one where I found it. That’s real value. Measurable.

The 34 skills are leverage. Each one encodes a workflow I’d otherwise repeat manually. /review runs three agents in parallel. /wrapup captures session learnings so the next session starts smarter. /blog turns a debugging session into prose. You’re reading the output right now.

The model routing rules I built today — haiku for grunt work, sonnet for analysis, opus for the hard stuff — will save hundreds of dollars in API costs over the next quarter. Not glamorous. Just math.

But the valuation itself? It’s a replacement cost estimate. What would it cost to hire someone to rebuild this from scratch. That number has nothing to do with what it earns. A $37,400 system that generates zero revenue is worth exactly zero to anyone who isn’t me.

The Scar

Here’s the thing Codex flagged that actually stung: “single-user system. Transfer to another operator would require significant adaptation.”

Correct. Garret is optimized for one brain — mine. ADHD guardrails. Short feedback loops. Session protocols that assume scattered execution. The hooks fire in patterns that match how I think, not how a team thinks. Every playbook references my projects, my failure modes, my tools.

I built a $130K portfolio of software that only one person can operate. That’s either brilliant or a trap. Probably both.

The motorcycle guys call this “dialing in the suspension.” You set the preload, compression, rebound to match your weight, your riding style, your roads. Perfect for you. Useless for anyone else. And if you stop riding, the bike just sits there.

How much is a perfectly tuned motorcycle worth if you’re the only one who can ride it?

The Quiet Part

Twenty-two days. Fifty-nine commits. From a prompt file to a knowledge system that appraises itself.

The Codex eval gave me a 7.5/10 on implementation quality. Fair. The SecondBrain rewrites its entire log file on every append. The JSON parser uses regex. The smoke tests leave artifacts behind like a poltergeist. All true. All fixable.

But 9/10 on concept. 9/10 on planning. Those are the numbers that matter. The implementation catches up. The concept doesn’t change.

I’m building a system that gets smarter every time I use it. Not in the hand-wavy “AI learns” way. In the boring, operational, document-the-pattern-and-cross-reference-it way. Every session leaves the next session better equipped. Every bug I fight becomes a pattern that prevents the next one.

That’s not worth $37,400. That’s worth whatever the compound interest on organized knowledge is worth over a career.

I don’t know that number yet. But I know the formula.