What's your role on a team, and is that the role you want?

My role has been "the person who builds everything." Solo developer, sole architect, sole maintainer. Six products, twelve deployed applications, 190 deployments.

That was necessary. The agency couldn't afford a team. But it's not the role I want long-term.

What I want is to be the person who sees the whole picture and enables others to build pieces of it. The architect who designs the system, writes the critical path, establishes the patterns, and then trusts teammates to extend them. I've already started doing this at a small scale: the shared infrastructure libraries I built, @tiny-platforms/ui, validators, config, were designed specifically so that future developers could build new products in the ecosystem without needing to understand every decision I made. They just import the library and the decisions are embedded in the code.

I want to be on a team because I've learned what solitude costs. Building alone taught me everything about ownership and initiative. But it taught me nothing about collaboration, code review, technical mentorship, or the kind of thinking that only happens when two people disagree productively about an architecture decision. I'm ready for that.