I Dogfood Everything I Build — Here's Why It Makes Better Products

There's an old saying in tech: "eat your own dog food." It means you should use the products you build. Every day. I'm a solo dev shipping three macOS/iOS apps simultaneously, and dogfooding has become the single most important practice in my workflow. Not unit tests. Not user interviews. Just... using my own stuff and paying attention. Here's what I've learned. The Bug Reports Write Themselves When you use your own product daily, you don't need a QA team. You are the QA team. I built TokenBar — a menu bar app that tracks LLM token usage in real time. I use Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini constantly while coding. Within the first week of dogfooding, I found three issues that no amount of simulated testing would have caught: Token counts drifting when switching between models mid-conversation The menu bar icon becoming unreadable in certain macOS dark mode configurations A memory leak that only appeared after 8+ hours of continuous use Each of these would have been a 1-star review. Instead, t