01 — I build what I have to use.
Not a demo, and not a screenshot in a deck. If it is wrong, I am the one it is wrong for, and I find out before anybody else does. It is the only test I have ever trusted.
What each one does, and what it refuses to do.
Take something a person does by eye and by habit, make it explicit enough to write down, test it against the record — and hand it back before anyone acts on it.
That is the same job in four rooms. The quickest way to see whether any of them is serious is not the feature list — it is the line where each one stops.
AirOrchestra Building
It makes the record at the end of a shift out of what people actually said: the hours, the photographs filed to the right job, the plan for the next day, the material that has to be ordered, and the question that goes on the list for the person running the job. Nobody opens a form. At the end, the whole job comes out as one document the company owns and can take anywhere.
The assistant inside it is called Green. It reads the documents the project already holds rather than assuming what is in them, and it drafts what comes next.
Built at Torspan LLC, which I co-own with Andrei Tcelikov.
What it will not do. Where nobody said it, the field stays blank and says so out loud. Nothing is decided on its own and nothing is filled in to look finished.
What I got wrong. For a long time it answered questions about documents it had never read. It knew the file was there and did not know what was in it — and from the outside those two sound exactly the same, which is what makes it worse than knowing nothing. Reading the documents turned out to be most of the product, not a feature of it.
PolarStar Lab Building
A research lab for futures traders. It composes a setup out of market primitives — liquidity sweeps, retraces, displacement, breakouts — in any order, instead of picking from a fixed menu of somebody else's ideas. Then it back-tests that setup against fifteen years of index-futures history and tries to break it: walk-forward, out-of-sample, and a hold-out it has never seen, ending in one word — go, caution, or no-go.
Two defaults it ships with, because the honest ones are the unflattering ones. Costs and slippage are on. If a single bar touches both the stop and the target, the stop is the one that fills.
Most tools in this category show you a curve. This one hands you the machine that produced the curve.
What it will not do. It does not connect to a broker and it never places a trade. The position sizer refuses to compute at all if the measured edge is not above zero.
What I got wrong. I built the research before I built the way to hand it to somebody. The engine has been ahead of the package it ships in, and the manual has been in the wrong language for the people reading it. That is the wrong order and it is the part I am fixing.
Washington motorcycle knowledge test Running
A free practice test for Washington's motorcycle endorsement exam, built off the state's own operator manual. 188 questions across nine topics. Each session is a topic-balanced set of twenty-five — the same twenty-five the real exam asks, and the same eighty percent to pass. Answer one and the explanation comes back with a link straight to the page it was taken from.
It is in English and Russian, and the toggle keeps your place. The options stay index-aligned across both languages, so switching can never move the correct answer.
It is one HTML file and one JavaScript file. No build step, no framework, no account, no tracker, no font fetched from anybody else's server.
What it will not do. It does not issue anything and it is not a state product. It is practice, built off the manual and pointing back at it, and it says so.
promptsmith Running
It takes a rough idea talked out loud and turns it into a precise, ready-to-run instruction for a coding assistant, then says how much effort is worth spending on it.
It is built for dictation, which means it assumes the input is garbled speech and rebuilds mangled technical terms from context — and copies anything you quoted exactly as you said it. It asks a question only when the draft genuinely fails one of four checks, and never more than one round of them.
What it will not do. It never runs the task. That is not a rule it was asked to follow, it is the tool sandbox it was given: "fix the build" comes back as a prompt, not as a build.
What I got wrong. It recommends a model by name, and model names age. That line should have named a tier.
Building · Running · Parked · Retired — the four words this page uses about a project's condition. They are conditions, not news.
How I build.
Three rules, and the first one decides the other two.
02 — Every line carries who said it.
A number in a record has a person's name on it, or the sheet it came off. Not a guess, not a default, not a tidy-looking figure nobody can trace back. If you cannot follow a line to where it came from, it is not a record.
03 — Empty is an answer.
Where nobody said it, the field stays blank and says so out loud. This is the expensive one, because software that leaves a field blank looks unfinished and software that fills it in looks complete. Filling it in is guessing — and a plausible wrong number gets signed, while a blank gets a phone call.
This site.
Static files on a free tier. No framework, no build server, no admin panel, no database. It is in version control, and it is deployed by pushing to it.
Nothing here is stored on your device. No cookies, no local storage, no account, and no banner asking you to agree to any of that, because there is nothing to agree to.
What I refused to add. A chat window with something automatic behind it. A newsletter box. A subscriber count, a post count, a view count — a counter is a thing that can display zero. An archive by year, because a year with two entries announces a thin year. Comments. A date on anything that is not a permanent link.
Why there are no dates. What is written here is supposed to still be true in a year. A date invites you to check whether it is recent instead of whether it is right.
If I stop. It is static and it is in version control, so somebody else with access to the repository can keep it resolving without me.