Without a second brain, I don’t think I’d have gotten this far
I originally started building a stock portfolio app, then walked away from it for a while.
A group of colleagues and I had started it as a study group, but it just kind of fizzled out. After that, I spent about six months playing League of Legends. Made it from Iron to Platinum.
I picked it back up in May of this year. But when I fired up the tools again after a few months, the world had changed. The AI coding tools had jumped to a completely different level of polish. What used to take constant back-and-forth — give a direction, review the output, course-correct, repeat — now just worked with much broader instructions. I finished it in two weeks. The thing I’d been unable to finish for over a year.
One thought hit me: “I could build anything alone with this.”
It was pure curiosity. I decided the next project would be built with agents from day one.
But there was one problem.
Nothing was accumulating.
I’d spent two hours with the AI restructuring a project’s architecture. Good conclusions came out of it. The next day, I tried to find that conversation — scrolled and scrolled, couldn’t find it. Eventually gave up and started the same discussion from scratch. One thought hit me: “This is just disappearing.”
The hours spent in conversation, decisions I’d agonized over for days, lessons earned through painful mistakes — all of it was buried somewhere in a chat list, evaporating without a trace. AI doesn’t remember what I said yesterday. That’s by design, I know. But it still felt like a waste.
So I built a second brain. And that became the material for the stories here.
What I’ve built so far
Here’s what came out of that.
- hermes — a Discord ↔ second wiki loop bot. Running 24/7 on my development server.
- Hansaiam Art Museum — an online gallery my mother uses. Built it in six hours.
- trading MVP — the stock portfolio app I use myself.
- myWiki — using second made me think “this could be a real product.” Currently in development.
- slowloop lab — the brand hub that pulls it all together. slowloop.app.
Not one of these was a flash-in-the-pan. They’re all still running.
The name I gave this way of living — slowloop
At some point I needed a brand name. I had the AI generate a list of candidates, and two caught my eye: Slow Loop and For Loop.
For Loop is a name any developer would grin at. But for the people actually using my apps, it’s just two English words. Slow Loop was different. The name alone communicated something. A cycle that’s slow, but keeps going.
So I picked the name — and the philosophy came later.
While working through requirements for the brand site, the AI asked: “slowloop’s philosophy — what were you thinking when you chose this name?” I paused. There wasn’t some grand reason. Just.
“I want to keep doing what I’m doing, steadily.”
That was it. The AI’s response was kind of funny — “That’s a perfect brand philosophy. ‘Not fast and then gone, but steadily doing what you do’ — it’s exactly what slow + loop means.”
I’d picked the name first, and the philosophy had already been living inside it.
What I share here
slowloop has three parts.
Blog — the space you’re reading now. I write about what I run into while building alone with AI agents. What works, what doesn’t. The know-how from my specific context isn’t on Google. That’s what this place is for.
YouTube — coming soon. Shorter than the blog, essay-style. “Here’s what happened when I tried it” in 4–6 minutes. Not a tutorial. A story.
Projects — hermes, Hansaiam Art Museum, trading MVP, myWiki. Built to use myself, so they actually run. I share the process of building them here too.
One thing to say upfront — everything here is personal opinion based on my own experience. Not gospel. Some of it I write together with AI. If you think differently, feel free to say so.
I named it slowloop because I wanted to keep going without stopping.
The loop is turning.