Giffen
Labs

I've been building an 8-bit app that plays a song when you're near someone you've designated a lover, a friend, or an enemy. The concept is charming. The build is stuck. Here's why proximity is the hardest product surface I've worked on, and why I'm still going to finish it.

I've been shipping three to five days of work per evening on a real project and the bottleneck isn't typing speed or context length. It's whether I spent ten minutes pressure-testing the plan before I started. The agents that stress-test my design have become the single highest-leverage part of my workflow - and the one I almost skipped the first time.

Before I bring a graph-database approach to production regulatory data, I wanted to validate the model on a domain I understand at gut level. So I built it on my music library. Here's what I learned about graphs — and why it changes how I'd architect the compliance version.

I had automated research bots emailing me competitive insights, but the information sat in my inbox half-read and never synthesized. So I built a system that never forgets - one that accumulates knowledge over months, answers questions via WhatsApp, and produces battlecards, positioning summaries, and trend analyses for other teams.

Your AI agent can read your filesystem, execute shell commands, and make network requests. You're trusting it because the system prompt says 'be helpful.' That's not security — that's hope. Here's what actual isolation looks like.

I wanted Claude to analyze my bank statements. I wasn't going to paste my SIN into an API call. So I built a local sanitization proxy that strips PII before it leaves my network. Here's the pattern, the tradeoffs, and where it falls short.

Most people open Claude Code and start prompting. That works — until your sessions get expensive, your agent makes the same mistakes twice, and you're spending more time correcting than building. Here's the step-by-step setup that fixes it.

I've cut back on drumming. I stopped going to the gym. My daughter goes to bed and I open Claude and don't close it until 11:30. I've done more in three months than I did in three years. It feels incredible. I also don't know where it ends.

My colleague and I had been building the same thing without knowing it. She had the analytical depth — severity scoring, outlier detection, GDPR coverage. I had the infrastructure — 23 scrapers, a PostgreSQL pipeline, a React frontend. When we compared notes, the merge took an afternoon. Here's why building first and coordinating later can be better than planning together upfront.

In 2018, four of us spent $18,000 and 20 months building an iOS app called Flusher. In 2026, I spent $354 and 24 days building Brown Note - a more complex app, on both platforms, by myself. Both apps were born from the same disease. The difference is what happened in between.