I'm Chris. I build AI systems that do the work, then keep the judgement human.

I lead product at Acorn in Sydney, where I've been building an AI-native way of working for the product team. I build the same kinds of things at home, and those are the ones I can show you.

If you're working out how you can get AI doing real work for you, or you've got a business idea and want to explore where AI fits, I'd love to help. It doesn't need to be fully formed. Half-formed ideas usually make the better conversation, and they're the ones I get the most out of, because I learn as much as I help.

What I've been building

Five of them, from a cake shop to a tower defence map.

01 In daily use

My in-laws' cake shop runs on Cake Orders every day

The paper form

Filled in at the counter, in whatever handwriting turns up that day.

A model reads it

Name, phone, pickup, the cake itself. Loose handwriting into named fields.

Confirmed by the staff member

Four taps against the photo. Nothing saves until every field has been looked at.

Counter and online in one place

The screen they open every morning. Website orders are already in it.

And then, all together

Their Shopify orders pulled through on their own, with nothing retyped

One run sheet for the day, counter and website in the same alphabetical list

Every order in the database, due dates and all

The original photo kept, so the paper is never the only copy

Findable by customer name months later

Invented order, real screens. The paper form and the fields read back from it are the same order.

My in-laws run a cake shop called Cake.Biz. Orders came in on paper and lived in a folder, which was fine right up until somebody needed to know what was due on Saturday.

I was careful not to change how they work. Same paper form, same handwriting, same person at the counter, and it just gets photographed now so everything on it ends up somewhere you can search.

They get fewer wrong phone numbers, and there's a printed run sheet on the bench each morning. Nothing has gone missing since. I built it for free, they're family.

It also got me into their Shopify account. There's a birthday club built in there now, and the next thing is agents keeping the catalogue and the pricing tidy.

02 Ask me for it

Competitive research that goes and does the reading

You set it up once Your business a page on what you sell and who you sell it to Who to watch five to ten names, or let it go and find them

Then the agents go out The open web Help centres and support articles Product and pricing pages Changelogs and release notes Whatever else is public

And this lands on disk your-business.md competitor-one.md competitor-two.md competitor-three.md and one for each of the rest

Every line is marked observed or inferred, so a confident guess can't pass as fact.

The reading is the part I could never keep up with, so agents do it instead, each one pointed at a different kind of source. Every competitor comes back as one markdown file.

The guesses are where I spend my time.

The folder is the useful bit. Ask a question across all of it and the answer comes back with its sources attached.

Happy to hand it over. Email me your GitHub username and I'll share the repo with you.

The Guild emblem, a gear with a hammer inside it

Connect · Build · Grow

03 Invite only

The people I want to still be talking to in twenty years

A close group of people I respect, from a wide range of disciplines, who I want alongside me for the rest of my career. We talk about what we're each working on, help out when somebody's stuck, and everybody ends up working harder for it.

Mostly I build in the open there, posting what I tried and what broke, which turns out to help more than advice does.

04 Playable

A Warcraft III map from 2005, rebuilt

Survivor TD running in a browser in its 3D view, with a tower's damage tooltip open, the current creep's armour multipliers, and the tower shop along the right

73 towers, 80 creeps, and every stat read out of the original map archive instead of off a wiki.

Pure hobby, this one. I spent most of my teens playing custom Warcraft III maps, there's one I wanted to play again, and getting a game going is basically impossible now. So I've been rebuilding it in the browser.

The data turned out to be the hard part. Every wiki about this map disagrees with every other wiki, and the ones that agree are copying each other. The original map file has the real numbers sitting inside it, so the toolchain opens the archive and builds the game from those.

Mine on the left. Everybody else's on the right, and none of them ended up looking like it.

05 Handed over

Setting other people up with the same way of working

I like it best when it stops being mine. The product team at work runs this way now, and outside work I've set the same thing up with close contacts, one at a time.

Everybody's version ends up different because it's encoding how that person already works. The only thing that transfers is writing the steps down and then watching the first few runs closely.

Say hello

Happy to show you how any of it works, or to sit down and build something with you.

[email protected]

Sydney, so AEST. If you're in Europe or the US, the reply will land overnight.