Apps

Most transcription apps upload your audio to a server to process it. If you are recording anything sensitive, a doctor’s visit, an interview, a private voice note, a business call, that is a hard no for me. So I built Private Transcribe: speech-to-text powered by Whisper, running entirely on your device. The audio never leaves your phone. Here is how it came together, and why one promise shaped every technical decision along the way. ...

After a long run of utility apps, I wanted to make something that was just fun. Something my niece could pick up in two seconds with no tutorial and no explanation. The “hop across endless lanes of traffic” formula is a classic for a reason, so I dropped a capybara into it and built Capybara Crossing: hop across roads, train tracks, and rivers, grab coins, try not to die. It turned out that a casual game is a completely different discipline from a tool, and it taught me things the tools never did. ...

Every mainstream AI chat app ships your conversations off to someone’s server. I wanted the opposite: a model that runs on your phone, messages that never leave the device, no login, no subscription. That app became Personal LLM, and getting a language model to behave itself on a phone was the most interesting engineering problem I have taken on alone. The itch Three things kept bugging me about the mainstream AI apps I was using. ...