“Could I build that?”

The tool I put off learning, then got absorbed in.

n8n Automation + Meta Ads

I spent about half a year thinking about learning n8n. Once I tried it, I got obsessed. I built a button-triggered workflow that reads a selected subreddit, finds relevant product mentions and saves structured results into a spreadsheet for review.

I tested a small Meta ad with a €5 budget and saw a €0.04 cost per click. Military re-training interrupted the experiment soon after. The part that stayed with me was how satisfying it felt to turn a repetitive task into a working system.

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My first push from an idea to a live website.

sleekshadow.com

I wanted to build a SaaS but did not have a clear idea yet. So I researched, chose a direction and started. A few hours later, I had a site with a working form that sent information to Notion.

It was my first real GitHub push. I deployed on Vercel and documented the process on X. It became the first home for my personal website. The site later moved to pijus.xyz, but this was where I learned how to take an idea from a folder to a live URL.

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A place for all the things I keep making.

Personal website

I built this site with AI coding agents. I bring the ideas, shape the experience, test what comes back and keep refining it. One of my agents was called Mr. Code. He was pretty cool.

The first version put everything on one long page. This version gives the work and the stories their own space. The Matrix background and wandering curiosity are staying.

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Speaking an idea into a piece of content.

Project Sapphire

Sapphire explores a simple idea: talk into a microphone, then turn those thoughts into social posts, newsletters or video scripts.

While building it, I got sidetracked filming a short video. Perfectionism made that much harder than expected. Then I went back and shipped dozens of small improvements.

My favourite debugging memory: watching an AI assistant struggle to turn a square into a circle for half an hour. Some days it builds a whole site. Some days, geometry wins.

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The Etsy problem I had already experienced.

DoneListing

Writing listings for my own shops took a lot of research. Hiring help meant a cost and a wait. I wanted a tool that made the first draft much easier.

What began as ListCraft is now DoneListing: a product photo and a short description become an Etsy listing draft with titles, descriptions, bullets, tags and keywords. It includes accounts, subscriptions and a working generation flow.

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“Create a video” became a whole workflow.

End-to-end automated video

After years of making videos, titles, descriptions and thumbnails manually, I tried connecting the entire process. A single instruction could trigger a niche choice, script, images, video assembly, voiceover and a YouTube upload.

I added ElevenLabs voiceovers and experimented with a web interface. The project also taught me about upload limits, media review and keeping one experiment from overwriting another.

I published around ten videos through this experiment. Model quality and provider access affected what I could produce. It is a different project from the newer editor, which works with footage I have already recorded.

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A five-minute idea with a four-hour detour.

Project Hotkey

I was working with an agent in a terminal and wondered why I was typing when I could just speak. I spent a couple of hours trying apps before deciding to build a lightweight voice-to-text tool with my coding agent.

The Linux version ran into compatibility problems on my older machine. It was still a useful experiment: I had gone from wanting a small tool to creating one. The original project had to wait a little longer.

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A still photograph, with a little life in it.

Project Lively

Lively turns a photograph into a short video. Trees move, hair shifts in the wind and sometimes a person blinks. I liked the idea of making family memories feel a little more alive.

I also imagined pairing it with a digital photo frame. The results were not always subtle: occasionally someone acquired an award-winning alien smile. It was a small, playful experiment with image-to-video generation.

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