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The blogWhat building apps and AI tools in a one-person studio actually teaches you.

2 series · 16 postsPete Griffin, Digital Vision

~/blog/six-months-in-building-a-thinking-partner/

Six Months In: Building a Thinking Partner

4 parts · October 2026

  1. 01I Wanted a Thinking Partner, Not a ToolMy business had gotten stale. When I came back to building this year, AI was the thing that made me want to dream about it again.
  2. 02Ambition vs Reality: Five Things I Pictured, and What They BecameWhen I set out to make Claude a thinking partner, I wrote down what I was picturing. I'm glad I did. Reading those notes back six months later is the best recor…
  3. 03Claude Doesn't Learn. Your Notes Do.A thinking partner has to remember you. So the question I most wanted answered was simple. Is Claude getting better at working with me?
  4. 04What a Thinking Partner Is Made OfI set out to make Claude the perfect thinking partner. I spent a spring sprint testing nearly everything it can do, then three quieter months while the first ve…
~/blog/what-i-learned-building-with-claude/

What I Learned Building With Claude

12 parts · June 2026

  1. 01Verify Everything: How I Stopped Claude (and Myself) From Lying to MeThere's a moment that happens almost every day when you build software with an AI. It tells you the work is done. The bug is fixed. The feature is live. It says…
  2. 02Don't Ship the Demo: Resilience Before FeaturesThere's a version of every app that works perfectly. The happy path. One user, good network, no edge cases, data well within expected limits. You demo it to a c…
  3. 03The Four-Reviewer Gauntlet: Reviewing AI Code Before It ShipsHere is a thing that will happen to you if you build software with AI long enough: you will ship a bug that a ten-minute code review would have caught. The buil…
  4. 04What Building AI Apps Taught Me About Base44Every platform has a gap between what it promises and what it actually does. The gap is usually small and usually undocumented. You find it by walking into it, …
  5. 05The Wix Gotchas Nobody DocumentsEvery platform has its paper cuts. Most platforms document theirs, eventually. Wix CLI — the framework for building apps that install into Wix sites — has a set…
  6. 06Making AI-Built UI That Doesn't Look AI-BuiltThere's a tell. If you've used enough AI-generated interfaces you start to recognise it: the cards all have the same radius, the font is a system serif that nob…
  7. 07Giving an AI a Memory: Building a Second BrainEvery AI session starts the same way by default: from nothing. The model has no idea what you built yesterday, what was left half-finished at midnight, what the…
  8. 08Telling the Truth in Product CopyThere's a moment when you're building a product page or a marketplace listing and you need a social proof stat. Something to put under the logo. "Trusted by X u…
  9. 09Docs as You Go: Why I Make Claude Write the README FirstThere's a specific kind of regret that comes from opening a repo you built three months ago and finding a single-line README that says "coming soon." The code i…
  10. 10Suggest, Don't Surprise: How I Delegate to AI Without Losing the WheelThere's a version of AI-assisted work where the assistant just handles things. You describe a goal, it executes, you review the result. Fast, frictionless, and …
  11. 11The Pivots: Six Months of Strategy I Got Wrong Before I Got It RightMost posts in this series are about specific, learnable behaviours. Write the docs first. Verify before you claim. Build error handling before the demo feature.…
  12. 12The Meta-Lesson: Compounding Knowledge Instead of Repeating MistakesEvery post in this series exists because of one habit: when something went wrong, or right, or surprised me in some way that mattered — I wrote it down.