One year ago, I started a new adventure. It felt different than the previous ones. This time I didn’t pack a backpack or prep a motorcycle for the journey. It started without a destination in mind. No end goal. No maps. No GPS pins on the road ahead.
On February 5th, 2025, I met Lorain.ai. I didn’t have a product or company in mind.
I wasn’t trying to build a startup in the traditional sense. I mostly felt like we were entering a very different phase in how software is built and how design is expressed. I wanted to understand what that meant by actually working within this shift, not watching from the sidelines.
Part of that came from curiosity, and honestly, from wanting to be less fearful of what AI might become. I’ve always believed the fastest way to lose fear is to replace ignorance with experience. The best way to understand a culture is to travel to its country. This felt the same.
So I started building small things.
I scratched my own itches and chased ideas as they showed up. Song lyrics turned into playful web apps. Conversations with friends turned into side hustles. Old family photos turned into animated videos.
Over time, this train of thought turned into a bullet train ready to bust out of the station.
Over the past year, those projects in the belly of this bullet train turned into hundreds of experiments. Tools. Dashboards. Internal apps. Prototypes. Half-baked ideas.
They weren’t built to validate a roadmap or chase a market. They were built to explore possibilities, understand limits, and develop intuition for what this new toolset is actually capable of.
What surprised me most wasn’t the number of projects I built, but how dramatically the iteration cycle shortened. At first, I hoped I could get to a prototype in a day. Then I expected it within an hour. Eventually, I assumed I’d have something working within minutes.
By dramatically trimming the communication gap between idea and implementation, and slashing the cost of early iteration, I was able to bring ideas to life in a way I never had before. Minutes, not months. Dollars, not thousands.
People like to say ideas are cheap and execution is everything.
What I learned this year is that execution gets a lot easier when the distance between thinking and building gets shorter.
My entire professional career has been in web development, with nearly 20 years spent working almost exclusively in the WordPress ecosystem. It’s a space I know deeply, and I’ve worked alongside some brilliant developers.
But I’m not a developer in the traditional sense. I’m a builder. A tinkerer. An idea guy with more interests than I’ll ever have time to chase.
Call it ADHD. Call it lack of focus. I’ve come to see it as fuel. But for the first time in my life, I don’t feel “throttled” by the systems I’m exploring. I feel empowered to design, build, and create without boundaries. To push the accelerator to the floor.
This past year felt like decades of conversations, curiosity, and skills finally boiling over and colliding with a moment in technology that allows ideas to move at bullet train speeds.
I gave myself permission to play in this artificial intelligence sandbox without worrying about who might sign up or pay for what I was building.
Removing the question “What does the client want?” led to an explosion of creativity, testing, and deployment.
There’s an old saying in the web industry: eat your own dog food.
I want to expand on this idea:
· Scratch your own itch.
· Build your own tools.
· Eat your own dog food.
· Share it with the world.
A year of scratching my own itches resulted in some extremely niche, and occasionally overly goofy, websites and apps. But it also led to something more meaningful: a massive virtual workshop packed with experiments, tools, and blueprints ready for the journey ahead.
The shift I’m exploring now is clearly disruptive to the world in ways we don’t yet understand. But it also feels additive. The speed of iteration we have today, combined with genuinely powerful intelligence, feels like giving a creative and motivated individual a new kind of leverage.
Not pressure. Not replacement.
More like a superpower.
Over the next few months, I’m going to share more of what I’ve been quietly building and what I’ve learned along the way. Not as a product launch, but as documentation of a year spent loading the belly of this bullet train.
Thanks to everyone who’s followed along, asked questions, or quietly watched this unfold.
But I’m not a developer in the traditional sense. I’m a builder. A tinkerer. An idea guy with more interests than I’ll ever have time to chase.
Call it ADHD. Call it lack of focus. I’ve come to see it as fuel. But for the first time in my life, I don’t feel “throttled” by the systems I’m exploring. I feel empowered to design, build, and create without boundaries. To push the accelerator to the floor.
This past year felt like decades of conversations, curiosity, and skills finally boiling over and colliding with a moment in technology that allows ideas to move at bullet train speeds. I gave myself permission to play in this artificial intelligence sandbox without worrying about who might sign up or pay for what I was building.
Removing the question “What does the client want?” led to an explosion of creativity, testing,
and deployment.
There’s an old saying in the web industry: eat your own dog food.
I want to expand on this idea:
· Scratch your own itch.
· Build your own tools.
· Eat your own dog food.
· Share it with the world.
A year of scratching my own itches resulted in some extremely niche, and occasionally overly goofy, websites and apps. But it also led to something more meaningful: a massive virtual workshop packed with experiments, tools, and blueprints ready for the journey ahead.
The shift I’m exploring now is clearly disruptive to the world in ways we don’t yet understand. But it also feels additive. The speed of iteration we have today, combined with genuinely powerful intelligence, feels like giving a creative and motivated individual a new kind of
leverage.
Not pressure. Not replacement.
More like a superpower.
Over the next few months, I’m going to share more of what I’ve been quietly building and what I’ve learned along the way. Not as a product launch, but as documentation of a year spent loading the belly of this bullet train.
Thanks to everyone who’s followed along, asked questions, or quietly watched this unfold.
