A non-technical founder building audio & media tech with AI
I'm a business and product executive with zero coding experience. After years of working with engineering teams at Amazon, Wondery, Fox, Rovi, and TV Guide, I decided to build my own projects using AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor).
This blog documents the journey—technical deep-dives on what actually works in production, AI prompting strategies, architecture decisions, and lessons learned the hard way.
If you're a founder without a technical co-founder, a PM learning to code, or a developer exploring AI-assisted development, welcome. I'm learning in public, and I hope these posts help you ship faster.
Want to learn more about my background? Check out my About page or connect with me on LinkedIn.
A deep dive into debugging a distributed audio processing pipeline where sound effects and speech were starting simultaneously instead of sequentially. Learn why file names can be misleading, how observable systems save hours of debugging time, and why the "obvious" fix is sometimes in a completely different file than expected.
Read Article →A business decision framework for when to use AI's judgment versus deterministic precision. Learn when AI costs 1000x more than it should and introduces unnecessary risk—with examples from clinical trials, finance, legal, and marketing across industries.
Read Article →How I built a desktop app that adds word-by-word captions to videos using Whisper AI and FFmpeg—all running locally with zero ongoing costs. Technical decisions, challenges solved, and lessons learned building a distributable Electron app in one development sprint.
Read Article →How I'm planning a natural language search system for hundreds of music cues using local LLMs, audio analysis, and semantic embeddings—without spending a penny on API costs. From librosa feature extraction to Ollama descriptions to sentence-transformers, a complete guide to building local-first AI tools.
Read Article →Why the webhook pattern beats synchronous calls and Airtable API updates. After building five production microservices, here's what actually works—including when to use Airtable AI vs AWS Bedrock, and how to debug across the stack.
Read Article →How I built a custom static blog in hours instead of wrestling with WordPress. From contemporary serif design to bold TV Guide aesthetic—complete design evolution, comprehensive SEO/GEO optimization, and zero hosting costs. All through conversation with an AI coding assistant.
Read Article →From Reddit inspiration to production deployment: How I built a browser-based vintage audio tool with Claude Code, learned about Web Audio API, and shipped it live with GoatCounter analytics and full SEO optimization—all in about 90 minutes.
Read Article →How I learned to deploy FFmpeg in serverless environments after weeks of architecture mismatches and "exec format error" messages. From Lambda Layers to ECS Fargate, here's what actually works—and how to guide your AI coding assistants to get it right.
Read Article →