I Built an AI Reviewer That Refuses to Tell Me If My Idea Will Work
This blog has been quiet for ten years — the last post here is a Windows 10 dark-theme registry hack. I'm putting it back to work. Going forward this is where I'll write about the AI systems and tools I'm building, with more room than a social post gives me. First one: a small protocol that talked me out of a bad idea before I wasted months on it. The wrong question The first startup idea I tested with my own AI review protocol didn't survive the review. That wasn't a failure of the protocol. It was the point. I built the protocol after realizing something uncomfortable: asking an LLM whether an idea is good is almost the wrong question. Modern language models are very good at constructing coherent arguments, but they can't determine whether a business will succeed — that depends on evidence the model simply doesn't have. Ask for a brutal review and you usually get the tone of criticism wrapped around the same underlying agreement. Better prompting d...