Solo founder warns: poor SR&ED documentation turned a claim into three weeks of archaeology

A solo founder of CloudWise, an AWS cost optimization tool, spent roughly three weeks reconstructing documentation for a Canadian SR&ED tax credit claim after filing it himself without a consultant. Canada Revenue Agency requires claimants to document technological uncertainty — what was unknown, what was attempted, and why initial approaches failed — but the founder had recorded only code commits, not the reasoning behind failed experiments. He successfully received a CRA refund following a T2 reassessment notice, but warns that rebuilding a 14-month narrative from git history and AI coding sessions was far costlier than anticipated. The core issue is that commit logs capture what changed, not why earlier approaches were abandoned — information that fades quickly from memory. He now advocates a simple habit: writing two lines per dead end on the day it occurs, which he estimates would have reduced the reconstruction effort to a few days.