How I build with AI

Not a resume. Everything here is real and most of it is running right now.

Running right now

wade-wiki

A personal wiki that maintains itself.

talk into phone on a walk→transcribed→filed + cross-linked by AI→auto-committed to git

I say something on a walk. By the time I'm home it's filed, linked to five related ideas, and committed to git. Fixes the graveyard problem: ideas you capture and never revisit.

Burpee Counter

Voice counting designed around the AI's failure mode.

Speech recognition mishears a man gasping at rep 70. So spoken numbers set the count instead of incrementing it, and a miss heals itself. Designing around the model's weakness is most of the job.

The project page The live app →

AI Usage Meter

A menubar app that tracks how much AI I have left.

Quota is a household utility now. It sits in the menubar so I stop finding out at 11pm.

The project page

The bench — tools in rotation, with verdicts

Claude CodeWhere everything gets built. CouchWord came out of one overnight session.

MCP serversMail, calendar, browser, iOS simulator. Chatbot becomes coworker.

whisper.cppLocal transcription in about a second. Why voice costs me $0.

Wispr FlowTalking to my pocket on a walk.

Obsidian + SyncThe AI maintains the files. I wander them.

GPT + GeminiSecond and third opinions.

GitHub PagesFree, static, boring — a compliment.

Opinions I've earned

Design around the failure mode, not the demo.
Raw stays raw.
Files are the treasure. Tools are rentals.
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch.
$0 marginal cost is a design constraint that makes you smarter.
Specificity beats generality.

Didn't survive contact

LifeOS

b. January 2026 † superseded May 2026

The processing worked; the ritual didn't. Lesson: start from capture, not reports.

The tutorial-following era

a kanban board and a project-management app that shall live in private repos

Followed other people's prompts. Learned the tools, shipped nothing. Lesson: only your own problems teach the craft.

An AI note-taking app

b. and † 2026, quickly

Notes apps are where notes go to die. Lesson: capture was never the hard part.

Poke it. It's all live and on GitHub. Get in touch for the long version. And yes, this page was drafted by Claude Code inside that wiki. Of course it was.