I’m Josh. Here’s how I got here.

I got tired of re-explaining who I am at the start of every session, so I built a linked knowledge base with a documented retrieval policy: every note describes itself, and one command returns the whole map. Every AI session I run reads it first, on my laptop, in the cloud, and on my phone. I tested it cold once and it answered six of ten questions from the notes alone, citing where each answer came from — and the four it missed were things I had genuinely never written down.

• ReadI stopped re-explaining myself to my AI— the whole story, including the cold-start score
• CodeThe instruction file that runs this site— the same idea, applied to a codebase instead of a life

I turned a research method Stanford published into a tool I can invoke. It runs fourteen agents on one question — five perspectives interviewing each other against live search, then eight fact-checkers — and I pointed it at company earnings. Every report on the Market Storm section came out of it, and each one prints how many of its own claims survived checking.

• LiveMarket Storm— five reports, all produced by the pipeline
• LiveA report, with its verification ledger— confirmed / partly true / corrected, counted on the page

A model asked to check its own work agrees with itself, so the instruction has to be to refute, and the agents have to be different ones. On the Microsoft report it changed the headline rather than adding a caveat: the widely repeated line was that capex doubled while free cash flow stayed positive, and free cash flow had actually fallen. I have also run it on my own finished research and lost — seven of eight load-bearing claims came back corrected, and I shipped the corrections.

• LiveThe report whose headline the check rewrote
• ReadA pipeline with no server— how the automated half of this fits together

I asked for ten image templates and kept four. What settled it was rendering both versions side by side rather than arguing about them, and measuring an instinct instead of acting on it — I thought the type would look wrong on a phone, and measuring showed a card renders at 341 pixels there, where 69% of the words were unreadable. The six I cut had each cleared a quality bar the AI wrote for itself.

• CodeThe image generator and its four templates— including the written reasoning for the cut
• LiveThe images, in both themes

I run scheduled agents with names and job descriptions — one tidies the knowledge base nightly, one sweeps it weekly, one drafts the day's writing before I wake up. The ceiling is deliberate. Making that last step automatic would be easy and I do not want it, because judgment is the part I keep.

• ReadI built my own dashboard, then took it apart— why the thing that watches cannot live inside the thing it watches
• ReadWhat my AI handed back— where the line between us actually falls

Most of what is in the gallery is this: a restaurant platform with a menu, a cart and a checkout; a journalling app wired to a language model; a focus timer with session analytics, a twelve-week heatmap and an achievement system. Different problems, same loop.

• AppSamurai Kitchen— Next.js · React · TypeScript
• AppAI Diary— Next.js · React · TypeScript
• AppPomodoro Timer— Next.js · React · TypeScript

I built ordering for a friend's catering business against his real Square catalogue rather than a copy in the codebase, because his kiosk already runs on it and any second copy is one that goes stale. That meant full support for his customisations — twenty-two modifier lists, with the prices resolved on the server so the browser cannot name its own.

• AppSamurai Kitchen— Next.js · React · TypeScript
• ReadI built my friend's food truck site with AI— what actually happened, including what I did not ship

Before publishing an article about my own tools I stopped and asked whether they could be attacked, and found my live task list — forty-three items — being served to anyone with the URL. I closed it in about sixty seconds with a reversible fix, then built the proper gate, and only restored the data after watching production actually deny the request. On the restaurant checkout, an audit nobody asked for found the server taking the charge amount from the browser.

• ReadI found my own task list on the open internet
• ReadI tried to break my friend's AI-built site— and deleted the hole instead of patching it

An order total read $0.00 on the deployed build and was correct locally every time. My machine runs one long-lived process; the deployed one does not share memory between requests, and the mock state was sitting in it. Same category as a ten-minute build hang that turned out to be pages calling a live API while they were being built.

• AppSamurai Kitchen— Next.js · React · TypeScript
• ReadMy dashboard said published. The URL said 404.— the same lesson in a different disguise

Teaching a scheduler to publish without me took six failures, and five of them reported success. The worst flipped an article halfway, failed, and then went invisible to every later run because it was no longer due — reporting "nothing to do" over a permanently stuck state. The fix was a reconcile pass. It now opens and merges its own pull request with nobody watching.

• ReadFive of my six failures reported success
• ReadA pipeline with no server

At work this guards financial aid arithmetic — twenty-three assertions on every single change, because that is the part which is not allowed to be wrong. The same pattern runs on this site: a test refuses an article dated in the future, and another one refuses to ship a post with missing images, which immediately found two already-published posts with no social card.

• CodeThe tests that guard this site

A Mars transfer simulation that models a real Hohmann transfer window, and a cloth simulator running Verlet integration with constraint relaxation and tearing. Both are hand-written on a canvas with no engine underneath, which is the only way I would have learned what the maths actually does.

• AppSpaceX Mars Transfer Simulation— HTML5 Canvas · Vanilla JavaScript · CSS3
• GameCloth Simulator— HTML5 Canvas · Vanilla JavaScript · CSS3

The arcade is five cabinets. Flappy Bird Primo is the one I would point at first: fifteen modules, swept collision detection so nothing tunnels through a pipe at speed, and a full juice catalogue — particles, screen shake, a slow-motion beat on a near miss. Two of the cabinets are my son's.

• GameFlappy Bird Primo— Vite · TypeScript · PixiJS
• GameAUREUM Snake— HTML5 · CSS3 · Vanilla JavaScript
• GameGrove— HTML5 · SVG · Vanilla JavaScript
• LiveThe arcade— all five, playable in the browser

This site runs on semantic tokens rather than colour values scattered through components, which is what makes dark mode a switch instead of a rewrite. The palette is deliberately warm charcoal rather than black, because cold black would throw away the identity the light theme has.

• CodeThe design system, written down— every rule that is a decision rather than a default
• LiveThe site itself

The arcade's bright red, yellow and blue fail contrast on a paper background, so every text use points at a darker ink. In dark mode those inks flip to the bright neon, which pops on the dark cabinet. A light-mode constraint turned into a dark-mode feature — the rule made it better rather than duller.

• CodeThe ink flip, and why it exists
• LiveThe arcade, in both themes

The first sweep lit up with every generated tell I had reached for by instinct: coloured rails on cards, tinted sub-panels, cramped table frames. I reworked each into plain headings, dividers and coloured text. Where the tool was wrong I overruled it by name, in writing, scoped so the same pattern elsewhere still gets caught — no suppression without a reason, and "intentional" is not a reason.

• CodeHow the audit runs, and what I overruled

I asked for my task board to be drag-reorderable and it already was. The real gap was different: card order lived only in each device's storage, so "make it draggable" and "set the order for me from somewhere else" were never the same feature, and only one of them was missing. Same instinct that turned "it flings when I drag slowly" into a diagnosis rather than a patch.

• ReadI put an app on my home screen in a day— the six prompts, and which three stood on earlier work

Robert has been a friend since high school and runs a Japanese catering business. Two calls on that job were mine rather than technical: I deleted a loyalty panel that promised points nothing awarded, and removed a review funnel that routed happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form. Both were working features. Neither was honest.

• AppSamurai Kitchen— Next.js · React · TypeScript
• Livesamuraikitchencatering.com— his live site

Eleven articles so far, all about my own builds, and the ones people respond to are the ones where something broke. The rule I write to is receipts over claims: if I cannot point at the thing, I do not say it.

• LiveEverything I have written
• ReadYou don't get replaced for being slow

My son wanted to make a game. I could have built it for him, and instead I taught him the loop: describe it, get something playable, look at it, ask for the next thing. He built a kart racer — his features, drive-over powerups and coins that make you faster — and then a second game on his own, which is the part that shows it transferred. The hard bit is not taking the keyboard.

• GamePebble Kart— HTML5 · TypeScript · Canvas
• GameGrove— HTML5 · SVG · Vanilla JavaScript
• LiveHis cabinets in the arcade