Who even is this hi there
I'm Danielle. I live in the Adelaide Hills and I co-run a startup festival called SOUTHSTART.
I've been using the A-word for a number of years. I've only kind of just realised how much of a forefront to my life it's become — and I'm genuinely grappling with how I should feel about that. Because it's not super normal. And I'm laser focused on where the line starts and ends. That tension — between how useful it is and how much of yourself you hand over to it — is something I think about a lot. It matters. A lot.
That's the tagline I keep coming back to. There's a blissful irony in the fact that I actually hate spending time on a screen. What genuinely excites me about AI isn't the technology — it's the idea that I can use it to get off the screen more. To unlock time that I actually own. To be present for the things that matter.
I've got two little kids. My single goal in life is to not have them grow up knowing me as someone permanently on a screen — tired eyes, half-present, consuming. The irony is I have to be on the screen to build the thing that gets me off it. I'm aware of that. But if I can use AI to compress the time I spend on screens and expand the time I spend actually living — that's the goal. That's the whole point.
Every time I try to explain any of this to someone, I watch the same thing happen. A family member mentions a problem. I start to say "oh, AI could genuinely help with that—" and I can already see it. The slight lean back. The polite smile. The is she about to try and sell me something face.
I get it completely. The language around AI has the exact same energy as every other hype cycle — blockchain, innovation, disruption, entrepreneurship. Words that got emptied out because people kept using them to sound important instead of being useful.
So this is my attempt at a different conversation. Plain language. Real examples. No pretending I have it figured out — because I absolutely don't. Just a few steps ahead, writing it down as I go.
Things I've actually built proof of concept
Not polished products. Not ready for prime time. But real things, solving real problems, that have already saved real time. I'm very conscious of scope creep — the biggest trap is that you start one thing and suddenly you're building seventeen things and finishing none of them. So consider all of this tinkering. A test environment. Work in progress.
None of these are finished. All of them work. And once you start building, you also become very aware of what A-word-made things look like — including this page. That's kind of the point. The exciting part isn't where it starts. It's how fast you can evolve and customise it. That's what we're going to do here.
Every single one of them — I am still the bottleneck. Which brings me to the thing I want to say clearly:
There's a version of the AI conversation that goes: "it can do everything, you just type and things appear." That has not been my experience. Every single thing I've built has needed me — to make decisions, to spot what's wrong, to know what good looks like, to understand the context that AI simply doesn't have. AI makes me faster and more capable. It does not replace the judgment, taste, or accountability that comes from being the actual human responsible for the outcome. If that's reassuring to hear — good. Because it's true.
What this blog is the actual point
I'm not about to do a master's in this. I don't think you need one to get value from this — though I'm also not going to pretend that deeper knowledge wouldn't unlock a whole other level. I'm sure it would. But that's not what this is. This is about what's actually accessible, practical, and useful when you just want to solve a real problem.
Think of this as thinking out loud together. If something I'm exploring sounds useful to you — come explore it. If you've got something you want to build and don't know where to start, that's literally what this is for. Ask. Let's figure it out.
Coming up ✦ all coming soon
I want to go back to absolute basics — the questions I keep asking myself, finally answered properly. Things like: what actually is an LLM? What's the difference between Claude and ChatGPT? What even is an API and why does everyone keep saying it? How do you actually ship something once you've built it?
Oh — and this entire post? Written and built in an hour this morning. Five AM. Couldn't get back to sleep. That's kind of the whole point. The gaps in between. That's where this gets built.
Gotta go now. Talk soon. Bye. 👋
No schedule. No spam. Just the next post when it's ready — starting with what an LLM actually is.
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