76 projects in eight months
From idea to phone
Making software development more productive
How I build with AI agents, what it has come to since March 2026, and an app port that took about an hour from asking to running on my phone.
Pulse
A product designed for people
A demo journal for people rebuilding their working life with a coach. One text box a day, and a report that only uses what the person wrote.
- text box a day
- 1
- automated tests
- 380
- commits
- 117
The situation
Pulse is a daily journal for people rebuilding their working life with a coach. It is a demo with one user, and the entries in these screenshots are made up.
What I did
The first version had numeric scales. The same day it became journal-style prompts, and then a single text box with one question: "How's it going?" No scales, no forms, no pressure. It can be typed, or dictated on the phone when the reminder goes off.
At the end of the period, AI turns the entries into the person's own section of the coach's report. It only writes what they said themselves, and it never writes the coach's part.
The phone app is Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, with the reminder and dictation built in. The words appear a few seconds behind you as you talk, and Tidy up cleans the transcript before it goes into the entry. The e2e tester walks every screen on Android, including the empty, loading, error and offline states.
The result
Pulse is a demo with 117 commits and 380 automated tests, on the web and on Android. Pulse Company is the same idea grown into a demo system for a whole centre, with coaches, clients, reception, HR and finance. One of its product rules is that the participant's side stays a single text box: no scales, no scores, no streak mechanics, ever.
What a team can take from it
I think the single text box is the part worth copying. The person writes what they want, and AI does the structuring afterwards, only from what they wrote.
If you'd like to talk about this, get in touch.
More case studies
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13 Android apps moved in ten days
No more platform compromise
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The checks that run on timers without me: scanning, patching, the test gate, backups and certificates. And what happened when a certificate authority was compromised.
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6 places I look closely
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What I look at when I don't read every line: the borders of the code, its shape, and the test count.
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4 prototypes before the spec
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Four prototypes on the first day, then the spec, the valuation engine and a web app in three languages on the second.
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5 to 7 directions to aim for at the end
Career Compass
AI advice you can check
My attempt at helping people who are thinking of changing jobs or career direction, without the AI getting stuck on what they already do.