Building THE WHEEL

Blog

What it's actually like to build a private knowledge engine from scratch.

Perspective February 15, 2026

AI Raises the Floor

AI doesn't raise the ceiling on what experts can do. It raises the floor on what everyone else can explore. What building solo with AI actually looks like — and what it means for innovation.

Process February 19, 2026

You Can't Skip the Failures

What 300+ stories, 8 workflow versions, and 36 shelved feature branches taught me about building something new. Under 10% of everything I built will ship at launch. That's the point.

Technical Coming soon

The Unsolved Search

The research community called privacy-preserving semantic search an open problem. Here's the journey across four fields — and a bit of Doctor Who — that found an answer.