The Numbers
As of March 2026:
- 519 commits (345 Marius, 174 Andrei)
- 64 work days (days with at least one commit)
- 11,000+ lines of Go
- 10 months elapsed (May 2025 to March 2026)
- 36 integration tests, self-contained, no external dependencies
- Claude as a coding partner since November 2025
The Commit History
If you plot commits by month, the recovery is visible:
May 2025 |█████████████████████████████████████████████████████ 109 Jun | 0 Jul | 0 Aug |██████████████████████ 46 Sep |████████████ 26 Oct |███████████████████████ 48 Nov |████ 10 Dec |██████████████████ 38 Jan 2026 |█████████████ 28 Feb |████████████████████████████████████████████ 88 Mar |████████████████████████████████████████████████████████126
June and July 2025 had zero commits. Two full months where I could not open the laptop.
August brought 46 commits. The burnout was still there, but I had figured out how to work around it: short sessions, no pressure, and stopping when my brain stopped cooperating.
The jump in February and March 2026 is partly Andrei contributing more on Linux, and partly Claude. Nobody worked on KEIBIDROP full-time. Andrei has a day job as a cybersecurity engineer; he contributed evenings and weekends. I was still burned out, teleporting through the house, juggling contracting work and a separate med-tech side project in Romania that involved reverse-engineering government SDKs (which is as fun as it sounds). KEIBIDROP sessions were sporadic: sometimes three hours at night, then dead for the next two days. Sometimes during the day, same result. Since November 2025, Claude has been a coding partner for design decisions, test harness construction, FUSE debugging, documentation, and the agent CLI. It changed the velocity of the project.
How It Started
In May 2025 I had just left a toxic work environment. I had lost twenty-six kilograms over the course of that job, partly from exercise and partly from stress. The job had me time-tracked with Time Doctor, expected to solo-write custom UDP protocols and FUSE-like filesystem code eight hours a day straight. Ironic that I then went and built another FUSE project voluntarily, but at least this time nobody was watching a timer. I was teleporting through the house, could not sleep, could not focus. Could not work, could not function.
I needed a project I chose myself, where the only deadline was my own curiosity, and where the technical difficulty was high enough to prove to myself that I could still do it.
So I started building KEIBIDROP: encrypted file sharing, peer-to-peer, no cloud, post-quantum cryptography, drag-and-drop via a virtual filesystem. Because apparently the correct response to burnout from writing filesystem code is to write more filesystem code. I pushed 109 commits in May and then crashed completely.
The Recovery Timeline
In hindsight, the commit history maps directly to recovery stages:
- May 2025: manic burst of energy, 109 commits, unsustainable.
- June/July: crash, zero commits, could not open the laptop.
- August through October: slow recovery with sessions averaging one to three hours. I still had ghost pain, the physical symptoms of burnout that linger after the stress source is gone. I could not sustain focus for long, but I could solve individual problems.
- November 2025: ghost pain started healing. I joined a startup full-time and stabilized it as best I could. I started using Claude for pair programming on KEIBIDROP. The ability to offload boilerplate and discuss architecture with something that does not judge or have expectations was surprisingly effective during recovery.
- December 2025 onward: functional again. Andrei ramped up on Linux and the project started moving at a real pace.
What Got Built
Across those 10 months:
- FUSE virtual filesystem; drag files into a mounted folder, they appear on the other peer. Handles reads, writes, truncates, renames, deletes. Cross-platform via cgofuse.
- P2P encrypted transport with direct IPv6 connections between peers and ChaCha20-Poly1305 for symmetric encryption. See Post-Quantum gRPC.
- Hybrid post-quantum key exchange using ML-KEM-1024 + X25519. If either algorithm is broken, the other still protects you.
- Slint + Rust desktop GUI, no Electron, 20MB binary. The initial UI draft was designed by my beloved wife Mila, which I then reproduced in Slint as closely as I could.
- Interactive CLI and agent CLI (kd), three interfaces for different use cases.
- No-FUSE fallback API for platforms where FUSE is not available.
- Self-contained test suite (36 tests, mock relay, no external dependencies). See Testing P2P Systems.
- Connection resilience, automatic rekey after 1GB/1M messages, health monitoring.
The Work Pattern
Burned out people cannot do eight-hour days, and four-hour days are unreliable. What works is short, focused sessions where you pick one problem and solve it.
Most of my sessions were one to three hours. I would sit down, pick up wherever I left off, push as far as the brain allowed, commit, and stop. If ninety minutes of real work happened, that was a good day.
There were no sprints, no standups, no velocity tracking. I worked on whatever I had energy for. The commit history does not lie, and neither does the two-month gap in the middle of it.
Claude as a Coding Partner
Starting in November 2025, Claude became part of the development workflow. In practice it works like pair programming with someone who has infinite patience, no opinions about your commit frequency, and will never ask why you disappeared for two months.
What worked well:
- Design decisions: discussing trade-offs for lock ordering, nonce generation, DirectIO heuristics. Having a second perspective on architecture, even from an AI, catches things you miss when working alone.
- Test harness construction: the self-contained test suite with mock relay and peer pair harness was built collaboratively. Writing test infrastructure is the kind of work that is hard to motivate yourself to do while burned out.
- FUSE debugging: the deadlock investigation, the macOS Preview compatibility work, the write/release race conditions. Claude helped trace through the lock acquisition chains and suggest brief locking patterns.
- Documentation and blog posts, including this one.
The commit velocity increase from November onward is partly recovery, partly Andrei, and partly Claude. It is hard to separate the three.
What I Learned
I spent months thinking the toxic job had permanently damaged my ability to do technical work. It had not. What had broken was my relationship with obligation. When I chose what to work on, and when the motivation was curiosity, the work came back. Some days it did not, and that was fine.
The project paused for two months and it did not die. When I came back in August, I picked up right where I left off. The important thing was always coming back.
AI pair programming turned out to be effective for solo developers during recovery. It reduces the activation energy for tasks that feel overwhelming when you are depleted. "Help me set up the test harness" is easier to type than to build alone from scratch.
Current State
As of March 2026, KEIBIDROP compiles and runs on macOS (Intel) and Linux (Debian/Ubuntu). Windows compiles but is untested. Apple Silicon is untested. We will get to those eventually, or we will not. The codebase is 11,000+ lines of Go with 36 integration tests. Andrei has been involved since day one: Linux testing, the gRPC stream serialization fix, architecture discussions, emotional support, and generally being the person I could call to talk through a problem or just vent about FUSE. The project is open source on GitHub.
About 10 of the 26 kilograms came back, and I intend to keep it that way. Healthy, sustainable, without neglecting the people around me or the responsibilities I chose to care about. The code came back too.
None of this would have happened without my beloved wife Mila, who kept the household running while I was non-functional, designed the initial UI draft for KEIBIDROP, listened to me talk about mutex deadlocks at dinner, and never once questioned whether I would recover. We still say "you got KEIBIDROPped" when something just works. My brother Andrei, who joined the project and made it real on Linux. And our family, who were there through all of it.