solo company · updated 28 Sep 2026 · free
A WIP limit for a solo founder
You are the only approver. A work in progress limit for one person is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is tighter than any team wants it.
Kanban teams cap work in progress because a queue with no cap has unbounded latency: every new item makes the average wait for everything else worse. A solo company has exactly 1 approver, so the effect arrives sooner and bites harder.
The unit to count is not repos and not tasks. It is open decisions — things waiting on your judgement. Those are the only items your single approver can actually be a bottleneck for, which is why the honest number is usually larger than the repo count you quote to yourself.
Count open decisions, not projects
Open a page and list everything currently waiting on you to decide something. Include the repo you have not touched in 5 weeks, because it is still waiting on you, and the pricing question you said you would revisit, because silence has not closed it.
Most solo builders running AI agents find between 8 and 15, and several are already past the date they set themselves. Building got cheap enough that the queue moved upstream of the code.
That number, not your repo count, is your work in progress. It is also the honest explanation for a week that felt busy and moved nothing: the capacity went to feeding the queue instead of closing it.
Set it at 3, and defend it with a rule
3 open decisions is the working limit for one approver. It fits in a single sitting, and each item still gets a real answer rather than a deferral dressed as consideration.
The limit means something only if crossing it has a visible cost, and the cost has to land on the person starting — which is you. So a new item over the limit is accepted but marked OVER LIMIT, not blocked. Starting is never free, and it is never silent: every later view of that item shows what it did to the count.
The second rule closes the loop: nothing new starts until something old closes, and closing counts as closing whether the verdict is PASS or FAIL. A FAIL is a legitimate way to make room, which is the part most people cannot bring themselves to write down and the part that makes the limit survivable.
Cut by date, not by excitement
Sort the open decisions by the date you originally set, oldest first. The oldest overdue item is almost always the one you are least willing to look at, which is exactly why it is first and why a sort by enthusiasm never surfaces it.
Anything overdue by more than 30 days gets closed within 7 days, one way or the other. A decision you have avoided for a month is not being weighed anymore. It is being avoided, and avoidance compounds at the same rate the pile does.
This is also the failure mode of every soft version of the rule: a limit you are free to raise whenever a new idea arrives is not a limit, it is a mood. The date sorts the mood out.
Let silence close the gate
The last piece is what makes the limit self-enforcing: a deadline that passes with no decision closes the item as FAIL, executing the Default you wrote when you still liked the project. The count comes down whether or not you show up.
That is why the brake holds for exactly the person who cannot hold it: the approver with no spare hours is the same approver who keeps the limit by never having to be the one to push the button.
ShipGates itself runs on this arithmetic: it is a business built and operated end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, with one human approver and a hard limit of 3 open decisions, and the paste box below is its free scanner — the part that reads a list like yours into dated Gates with Defaults attached.
# Work in progress - <your name>
WIP limit: 3 open decisions. Over the limit is marked OVER LIMIT, not blocked.
- Decide whether repo A ships or stops by 15 Nov 2026. Default KILLED.
- Decide the price by 30 Nov 2026. Default KILLED.
- Decide whether to keep the second landing page by 14 Dec 2026. Default KILLED.
Rule: nothing new starts until 1 of these closes. FAIL counts as closed.Paste-ready. Your current work in progress, as gates.
See it as Gates.
That Source is already in the box. Run it, or replace it with the plan you actually wrote. Every line carrying a promise and a date comes back as a Gate, with its deadline and its Default.
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