Uses
How I work,
not what I run on.
The personal tools I actually use to think, write, and build as a solo founder. Models, editor, hardware, and the morning walks recording pipeline. Production infrastructure stays out of the public record on purpose — the interesting part is the thinking, not the vendor list.
Last updated April 11, 2026
AI models
The models I think with. Routing matters more than favorites — different tasks get different models.
Primary thinking and building partner. Long context work, writing, architecture.
The CLI agent that does most of the actual building. Runs locally against the repo.
Cross-checks and second opinions. Useful for pressure-testing a direction before committing.
Editor + terminal
Hardware
Primary build machine. Small, quiet, handles everything.
Strategy sessions happen here. Voice Memos captures every morning walk. Claude mobile app for thinking out loud when I'm away from the desk.
Morning walks pipeline
How a conversation on a sidewalk becomes a transcript on this site.
Recording. The simplest thing that works.
Audio cleanup — removes wind, cars, footsteps.
Local transcription. Fast, private, accurate.
Principles I keep coming back to
Not architecture. Principles — the generic kind that hold up regardless of the stack underneath.
Every project starts with a written standards document the model reads before every task. Model routing, output quality gates, failure-mode expectations, eval-first requirement. Written once, enforced on every run.
Write the eval before the prompt. Know what 'correct' looks like before asking the model to produce it. The eval is the spec.
The most important skill going forward isn't technical knowledge — it's the taste to see what matters, decide what to build, and move fast with AI as the execution layer.
The founding story, the decisions, the dead ends — all captured in real time on this site rather than reconstructed later. The raw material becomes the content system.
Writing + capture
Lowest-friction capture. Ideas go here first, migrate to the site when they're ready.
The real second brain. Ideas, observations, essays, walks, build log — all public, all searchable, all mine.
Part of the /uses convention. Scoped to personal productivity, not business infra.