One Claude Code Skill made unemployment survivable. Now I made it a mobile app.

I was let go in April 2025. Budget cuts; the company was making about half of what it was spending. One nice thing about working somewhere like that is you can see it coming. They were still paying for executive coaches on the way down. I didn't think much of that at the time.

Then came twelve months of underemployment. Short contracts, state unemployment, any way I could find to get paid to code. Bad timing, because everyone had just been handed a coding machine. Line by line, I could write better code than Claude Code, code that performed better and stayed useful longer. I could never match the throughput. I knew because I was using it every day myself. I couldn't out-ship it, so I went all in on using it.

That meant agents for everything. Planning, coding, debugging, testing, deployment, project management. Every stage of the lifecycle got one. Most were a waste. A few lasted a month before they became out of date. One I still use twelve months later: the career coach, the only one that asked why the task needed doing at all. It never made a decision for me. It asked what I was spending my time on, and whether that matched what I said I wanted.

The answers were bad. I was spending 30 hours a week writing cover letters and getting zero interviews out of it. Another 10 hours scanning LinkedIn for jobs I was qualified for, with no more interviews than the week before. These were questions I could have asked myself. I was the one telling it to ask them, but I never stopped to ask them on my own. I thought I was busy.

The coach skill made me stop and figure out what was working: I stopped applying and started engaging with who was hiring engineers. I put the rest of my hours into staying at the edge of AI tooling and building concrete examples of how to apply it in practice, working demos I could show someone. After a couple months of trial and error, the conversations got me a role at Micro1.

After I landed, I still had the hustle bug. I asked friends and family what they'd want out of coaching and got nothing back. No one had been through what I had with career/executive coaching or the self reflection to turn things around.

As a last resort, I went to Reddit, where people were already asking for career advice in public. That was a gold mine. Plenty of them responded, and enough were interested that I had a beta list before I had an app.

That is when I built Keel from the coach skill.

Keel is that coach, on your phone. It reads your calendar and tracks your goals, so it already knows what your week looks like — you're not spending the first ten minutes of a session catching it up. You talk to it by chat or voice, and most responses land in under 500ms, so it feels like a conversation instead of a form.

What that buys you is the thing it took me twelve months to find on my own: someone asking whether the 30 hours are actually working. It doesn't hand you a plan or tell you what to do. It holds your schedule and your goals up to a mirror and asks if this is what you wanted. And because it's the same tool for the workout and the family dinner as it is for the promotion, you're not maintaining two versions of your life — in practice those are the same calendar.

A coach who does this well runs $100 an hour and books three weeks out. Keel opens at 10pm on a Tuesday, on any phone.

The beta is open. Sing up at https://keelcoaching.app. If you've ever put 30 hours into something that returned nothing, I'd like you in it.