I shipped a recruiting tool overnight. The COO used it the next morning.

PLG Challenge is a recruiting tool I built for Pace Loan Group in a single day. It has two Laravel apps — a public challenge site and a mock API — plus Swagger docs, PHPUnit tests, a full email flow through Mailtrap, and a scoring rubric for candidates.

The commit history is dated January 19, 2025. The docs folder has a file called EMAIL_TO_BALI.md that contains a production registration link and a message template ready for the COO to send to candidates.

She used it the next morning.

What made that possible

A year earlier I would have scoped this as a three-day project, minimum. What changed:

I started with a context document instead of a task list. Before writing any code, I wrote two paragraphs: what problem this solves for PLG, who the user is, and what "done" looks like in concrete terms. That context doc went into the agent's context and stayed there. Every subsequent prompt built on it.

The boilerplate was free. Auth, migrations, factory data, Swagger config — none of that took meaningful time. Which meant all my thinking went toward the actual product: what's a good scoring rubric, what should the candidate README explain, what does the COO need to see to decide whether someone passes.

I've done this enough times that I knew what to skip. The first five builds I over-engineered the testing setup. By this point I knew: PHPUnit for the critical paths, manual checklist for the rest, ship it.

The uncomfortable truth about one-day builds is that they don't feel like shortcuts anymore. They feel like the right scope for the right problem. The skill is just knowing which problems those are.