The Short Version

Shipped four approval-console tickets to the always-on box in one day

Every ticket survived three adversarial critic rounds with real blocks before it went live.

4 live ships, 12 critic rounds

Signed a mid-sized business for consulting and an enterprise software build-out

A deal that went cold for nine weeks came back. I walked into their office and left with a signed assessment.

Signed on site, scoped the same day

Rebuilt the console from measurements instead of taste

Two mockups got rejected. The third was built desktop-first from panels and computed styles measured off a live reference app, read-only.

Three tickets shipped to the box the same week

Shipped a nightly scan under an adversarial review loop

Ten tickets, every one run past a critic before it could ship, and roughly ninety root-cause fixes landed before night one.

~90 root-cause fixes before night one

Amazon Web Services AI Pitch Finalist

Pitched an AI advisory system built for a financial-advisory firm live on stage as a finalist in the Amazon Web Services AI Pitch (Indiana SBDC, Valparaiso).

Built a YouTube Shorts engine that runs itself on the always-on box

From a competitor teardown to a fully autonomous daily pipeline in two days: news sweep, de-slop-gated script, cards, cloned voice and music, render, avatar bubble, upload and schedule with read-back.

11 Shorts in four days, the last two with nobody at the keyboard

Gave the always-on agent hands on a browser, without handing it the keys

A credential broker that types secrets from 1Password without the value ever entering the container, a closed nine-operation browser vocabulary behind an origin allowlist, and a readiness ladder proven green twice.

Readiness ladder R1 to R7, green twice

Released /de-slop as a public GitHub repo

The AI-slop scanner, 26 rules with the em-dash rules folded in, went from a members-only Vault skill to a public repo anyone can install.

26 rules

Ran a pre-registered autonomy experiment, and published the loss

A two-arm A/B, identical agents on identical work with only one arm's guardrails removed, against a sealed failure criterion and seven sealed predictions. The criterion fired and all seven predictions were wrong.

0 of 7 predictions held

The always-on box became a decision-taking computer

The agent server now serves its own decision console over Tailscale with TLS. Findings, drafts and approvals flow through one recorded writer, and the first real approval was executed end to end from the console.

10 of its own bugs caught by its own checks before launch

Solved the click a defended page silently drops

Rebuilt browser automation around trusted input after measuring the blind spot: synthetic clicks land but are stamped untrusted, and a defended page drops them with no error to debug.

Trust gate proven 6/6

Shipped /lead-rescue, with the guardrail in the build instead of the README

A Vault skill that revives cold leads and writes the follow-up ladder, and structurally cannot send: the packer fails the build if a send path appears anywhere in the skill.

30/30 tests green from inside the packed zip

Gave every credential one source of truth, and made the sync prove itself

After a rotation silently invalidated a recovery bundle, the local env file is now rendered from a 1Password vault instead of hand-edited. 109 variables seeded into 44 items, verified 109 of 109 match.

109/109 match, first pull changed nothing

Shipped /de-slop, and proved the wedge instead of claiming it

The judgment layer above the em-dash remover, split into three tiers by determinism rather than topic, then tested head to head against a blank model on the same draft.

12/12 planted tells caught, 0% of a clean draft changed

Built the prototype live, during the first call

A prospect in the insurance space opened with the standard objection, that AI takes away the personal relationship. By the end of the call there was a working dashboard demo on screen.

22 fictional clients across 5 plan types, built during the call

Found the compliant path after the vendor said no

For a financial-advisory firm's client-facing AI build, the model vendor declined a custom zero-data-retention agreement. The answer was AWS Bedrock with retention set to none: zero retention by default, zero operator access, self-serve, no platform fee.

Shipped a member-engagement engine with a zero-LLM runtime

A member-engagement system for a community platform with no public API: campaign batching, weekly digest bundles, and hard guardrails that abort the whole batch on the first unverified send.

186-member campaign run to exhaustion, self-terminated by design

Turned the free skills Vault into a real installable library

Members now pull branded skills straight from a private GitHub repo via a collaborator invite instead of downloading a zip. Version-controlled, updatable, revocable per member.

Built /dream, a local memory-curation loop the model cannot game

A reimplementation of the Dreams API curation pattern: extract, gate, single-model judge, then a deterministic script that re-verifies every evidence quote verbatim and enforces a two-session promotion gate.

30 regression cases plus eval cases

Shipped a claymation VSL: a 110-second animated sales video

A 15-beat, Wallace & Gromit-style clay-world sales video, live on the Zero to Automated About page: script → AI voiceover → AI-generated living-clay footage → vector composition, built beat-by-beat under human review.

15/15 quality gates passed

Built /funding-snapshot: live markets dashboard, fully offline

A skill that pulls fresh funding, price, and volatility for any ticker and bakes it into a single offline HTML dashboard. Shipped to the free ZTA Vault.

Funding rates on stocks, FX, commodities, and indices, not just crypto

Shipped the ZTA Authority Engine content system

Two alternating post types, proof posts and news takes, each gated through a 13-persona focus group before it ships, funneling to the free ZTA Vault.

13-persona focus-group gate on every post

Built /client-pack: branded docs from raw inputs

A brand-config skill that turns raw business inputs into branded proposals and invoices (HTML to PDF, no external service). Built for the free ZTA Vault.

Shipped Windows-PC cowork + Tailscale remote access

Runs the Brain on a Windows box, reachable by SSH from anywhere over a key-only, Mac-locked Tailnet.

Built a self-narrating AI intake demo for a dental practice

An interactive prototype for a dental practice weighing an AI patient-intake system: a working demo with an auto-playing narrated walkthrough that pitched itself, and moved the engagement to scope and pricing.

Shipped "Summer": a HIPAA-conscious AI voice receptionist

A live inbound AI receptionist ("Summer") for an insurance agency: state-law AI disclosure, structured medication read-back, and a warm hand-off to a human.

Live AI receptionist with human hand-off

Built a compliance-gated AI advisor system for a financial-advisory firm

An advisor dashboard with auto-generated quarterly PDF explainers and a compliance gate requiring a verbatim source quote and provenance tag on every output.

Launched VibeVoice

Launched VibeVoice, my native macOS voice-to-text app: code-signed with a hardened runtime, automatic updates via Sparkle, shipped as a paid product.

Stabilized a 137,000-line production platform

A deep audit of a 137,000-line production platform: built an AI-to-AI discovery protocol, surfaced silent backup failures and a runaway AI-spend leak, and designed a zero-downtime fix with a phased backlog.

105-item phased remediation backlog

Became a verified mentor in the Vibe Marketing Community

Verified mentor in the 2,500+ member Vibe Marketing Community, and presented the AAA Authority Acceleration Framework to the full community.

2,500+ member community

Pivoted into AI automation consulting

Launched the AI automation consulting practice (now Zero to Automated), the origin marker of the current chapter.