I don't know what I don't know

I’m a serial creative. I use AI to build things that fall inside my creative skill set but outside my technical ability. A 2D action game. A business assessment app. A content operation with its own production pipeline. I designed all of them. I couldn’t have written a line of any of them.

Let me get the uncomfortable part on the table first, because you’re going to think it anyway: I can’t review what I can’t read. When AI writes code for me, I cannot look at it and spot the subtle bug, the security hole, the thing that works in the demo and fails at scale. A senior engineer catches those by reading. I don’t have that ability, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose your trust.

Here’s what I want to be equally clear about: I’m not shipping retail software. I understand the risks well enough to know better. I build things I want to see and use — a game because I wanted to play it, tools because I wanted to work with them. When something I build touches other people, it goes through staging, security checklists, and a lot of deliberate paranoia before it does. But nobody’s pacemaker runs on my code, and I intend to keep it that way.

So why should you read notes from someone who just admitted the gap?

Because the gap is the whole point. Not knowing what I don’t know forced me to build systems that assume I’ll miss things. Decision logs, so settled choices don’t get quietly unsettled. Verification gates, so “it seems to work” never gets confused with “it works.” A rule that documentation updates in the same commit as the code, because docs updated “later” are docs that lie. A file that lists what not to build, because AI is relentlessly helpful and unsupervised helpfulness drifts.

None of that came from a book. Every piece exists because its absence cost me something — a week, a feature, a chunk of work I had to throw away. The notes on this site are extracted from those project logs, and each one carries a stamp telling you exactly which document it came from. When I’m wrong, the correction gets published with the same stamp.

I’m learning as I go. The difference between that being a liability and being useful to you is that I write down what the learning cost, and I only publish what survived contact with a real project.

If you’re a creative building outside your technical lane — these notes are for you. Start anywhere. The stamps will tell you where everything came from.