Projects

Building with AI

Small working systems I have designed and built with AI, and what building them taught me.

Each of these started with a problem I actually had: evidence of my work scattered across old CVs and proposals, useful thinking buried in very long conversations, and possibilities I dismissed before exploring them.

AI made it possible to build working versions quickly enough to test them while the problem was still fresh. The decisions about what to keep, what counts as evidence and what stays private remained mine. Each page describes the problem, how the system works, what changed through use and what others might take from it, with guides or instructions you can adapt.

  • Private system

    Evidence Garden

    A private system for recovering, checking and reusing evidence from a nonlinear career.

    Private pilot · 5 guides
  • Public digital garden

    InfoMagpie’s Nest

    A conversational knowledge system for recovering useful thinking from very long AI conversations.

    Live · 5 guides
  • Public working notebook

    BusyDoggie Fieldnotes

    An evidence-aware working notebook for questions about dogs.

    Live · Companion to InfoMagpie’s Nest
  • Research notebook

    Agentic Systems Reading Room

    A research triage system for staying oriented in a fast-moving field without pretending I will read everything.

    Live · With a taxonomy demonstrator
  • Conversational character

    Oliver from Strategy

    A conversational AI friend who sees more possibilities in your experience than you might.

    Experimental prototype · Instructions

What connects them

  • Start with a real loss, not a feature. Each system exists because something useful kept going missing.
  • Keep what happened separate from what it means. Records, sources and interpretations stay distinguishable, so nothing becomes more certain than it was.
  • Build the smallest useful version and use it. Most of the design emerged from noticing what the first version got wrong.
  • Make the human decisions visible. AI drafted, extracted and implemented; judgement about evidence, attribution and privacy stayed with me.
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