One sentence into Google Stitch, a retro-futuristic star mapping tool. Enter a date, get the dominant constellation, download a playing card.

Used Stitch for the design system, AI Studio to build. Spent most of the time pulling the tool back, removing things it added, fixing layout, adding the card export myself.

The responsive layout. Fix mobile, break web. Fix web, break mobile.

I kept opening the same five sites every morning to piece together what was happening in AI. At some point it made more sense to just build the thing I wanted to exist.

Designed and built a newspaper-style widget that pulls live AI news into a vintage broadsheet layout. Most of the decisions were getting it to feel like a publication rather than a feed which took longer than the build itself.

Retro aesthetics are easy to overdo. A lot of the time went into restraint, removing flourishes that looked interesting but made it feel like a theme rather than a design.

Built for an Arduino prototyping class. Two people each control one arm from a laptop touchpad, left, right, up, down. Six switch buttons on a shared board: four piano notes, two drum beats. The idea was that two people who'd never played music together could make something without any prior knowledge required.

Built the entire system across three environments, Arduino handling the hardware, Python bridging the communication and audio output, Processing handling the touch input. This was more about getting the whole system to actually work end to end and it did.

Getting three different environments to talk to each other reliably. Any one of them misbehaving broke everything else. Most of the debugging time was figuring out which layer the problem was actually coming from.