RAG4: The Foundation
The platform and infrastructure behind much of the AI-related work you'll find here. Rebuilt from scratch four times before I got it right.
Read the build →
Builds
All of this runs on a foundation I built first and keep feeding: thirteen knowledge bases holding everything from more than five thousand GovCon documents to over one hundred indexed book chapters, with Deep Research working across the whole set.
That foundation is what makes the range so wide and the turnaround so short. With the knowledge already in place and the platform shared across everything, a new build is mostly a matter of aiming it at the right corpus and giving it an interface. The same architecture turns out a gym workout generator one month and a federal accessibility checker the next, and a tool I need on Monday is often running by Friday.
Want to feel how it works? Ask the books a question over on the About page, then come back and see what the foundation has produced.
Build write-ups
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5mUX
Five-minute UX lessons, free for anyone learning the field.
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The Feed & The Thread
A daily two-voice podcast on what's moving across UX.
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Patterns & Signals
The signals beneath the daily noise, read weekly and monthly.
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Tugboat
A self-hosted daily briefing on active conflict across news, economics, and contracting.
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Conference & Bio
Drafts conference proposals and speaker bios from a UX knowledge base.
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Coffee Compass
A Fellow Aiden profile maker that learns your taste, shared as a build-it-yourself PRD.
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Spirit Spy
A private spirits catalog that reads labels and enriches them locally, shared as a build-it-yourself PRD.
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Comics Collector
A private catalog for a three-decade comic collection, enriched against two databases and shown as a public longbox.
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Nucleus Radio
A self-programming personal radio station on the music I own, with a TTS DJ and generative shows.
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Courseware Creator
Turns source material into structured, narrated micro-lessons.
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Learning at a Glance
Specialized vocabulary distilled into bite-sized, just-in-time lessons.
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Deep Research
Private, local deep research that shows every step of its work.
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UX Sentiment Research
Vendor-blind research that reads what users actually say about a product.
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Compliance Checker
Accessibility scanning paired with knowledge-grounded fixes.
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Heuristics Evaluator
A screenshot in, a structured heuristic critique out.
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HomeLab Security Dashboard
A homegrown SIEM that turns raw firewall noise into a readable story.
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Executive Order Translator
Translating executive orders into plain language for easy understanding.
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Also in the Platform
The seventeen above get the full write-up, but they're the visible edge of a much larger system. Here's some of what else runs on the same foundation.
- Studio, the creative cluster: a radio station, a podcast production suite, an internal ad platform, image generation, video production, transcription, an audio library, and a voice registry.
- Intelligence: industry monitoring across UX, GovCon, AI, and finance, with daily briefings.
- Security: a homegrown SIEM with its own incident-response knowledge base, an independent sentinel watching the network for anomalies, and frequent scanning and reporting that drives ongoing hardening.
- The rest of the knowledge layer: more than a dozen retrieval systems, each grounded in its own corpus, from personas and workshops to research methods, OKRs, accessibility standards, and federal-contracting regulations, all feeding the tools above.
- Orchestration: an always-on agent that runs the schedules, watches the system, and flags anything that needs a human.
It's the working set the rest of this sits on top of.
How I Work
I build and operate all of this on hardware I own. The architecture and the editorial calls are mine, local models handle the rote and repetitive generation, and the only ongoing cost is electricity.