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