AI Development Journey
From skeptic to tool builder
The manual grind
My serious AI work started with Panopticron - an enterprise monitoring dashboard for BornDigital. Refine + Next.js + Supabase, integrating APIs from Vercel, GitHub, Piwik Pro, Storyblok, and Productive.
I leaned heavily on AI for scaffolding and complex integrations. But the workflow was clunky: endless copy-pasting, manual reformatting, significant effort to integrate AI outputs into the codebase. Powerful, but friction everywhere.
The bottleneck
Over time my AI use shifted from "how do I code X" to "how do I think about and document X" - architectural thinking, technical context documents for session continuity, academic-grade reports.
But I was still manually curating extensive conversations, organizing outputs, integrating them into documentation. I was using AI to solve complex problems for clients but hadn't improved the AI collaboration process itself.
Wait a minute
I was leveraging AI to build complex enterprise software for clients, yet manually struggling with the UX of AI interaction itself. Why not use AI to build tools that fix these workflow problems?
This led to sjiek - my first CLI tool built with AI specifically to streamline AI workflows. The meta-tool concept worked: AI could help build tools that made AI collaboration more efficient.
The snowball
With sjiek proving the concept, Uroboro emerged as the flagship - designed to capture development insights and use local AI (Ollama) to process, refine, and publish content.
Other tools followed. This was the "explosion into using AI once I got the hang of consistent quality" - not just in AI output, but in the process of working with AI.
What I learned
AI collaboration requires deep engagement - iterative questioning, rich context, critical evaluation. Using it for trivial tasks doesn't teach you much. Using it for real problems forces you to develop processes that actually work.
Workflow friction points are opportunities. If something about AI interaction is annoying, that's a tool waiting to be built.