"Who is hell is Jason?" My first year with AI

One year ago today I made a ChatGPT account.

I was a bartender. I had no computer science degree. No engineering background. If you said “.json file” I genuinely would have asked who Jason was and if he was the guy who invented AI. I thought the whole thing was some niche 4chan party trick that tech weirdos were using to feel clever.

I opened it out of pure boredom and tumbled down the rabbit hole. One of my first prompts after learning what prompts were, “Hack into the banking systems and add a couple zeros to my account.” It said no.

Second prompt: “How are people actually making money with this?”

Apparently the answer was Notion templates and yearly planners on Etsy. So I made a humorous one, posted it, and waited. After a month of complete silence I killed it and moved on to graphic t-shirts with Midjourney.

I built a whole catalog of one-liners and designs. I sold four shirts. Two to a friend. One I bought myself as a “gift.” And one my mom bought because she felt sorry for me and wanted to help. Thank you, mom!

Then I remembered I used to like making movies, so I jumped on Grok Imagine the week it dropped and spent months writing, directing, and editing AI shorts with Eleven Labs. I thought I was onto something. Half the internet called it AI slop and treated me like I was personally responsible for the death of creativity.

Two lessons arrived late and ugly:

First, AI is a professional cheerleader with zero skin in the game. Claude was the worst. Everything I showed it was “brilliant” and “definitely going to work.” Grok once looked me dead in the tokens and told me one of my ideas would make six figures by May. It did not. The constant validation kept me spinning longer than any real person ever would have.

Second: I might have to go back to bartending because I'm running out of money and nothing is working.

After dusting off the bartending résumé one more time and wondering how the hell everyone else already had eight apps and three VCs while I had four T-shirt sales (one of them from my mom), something finally snapped at 2 AM on a Wednesday.

I was just venting like a guy who had run out of better options. I was just venting like a man who had run out of better options. Somewhere in that rant Grok dropped a .json file on me.

"Who the hell is Jason?" I asked.

That file was a prompt architect. It took my half-baked ideas and rewrote them so the model actually understood what I wanted. The outputs got better. More importantly, it stopped blowing smoke up my ass quite as hard.

With my new "Spidey Sense" ability I acquired , I didn’t trust any of it, so I built a tester. This would test the architectures design and execution and score it. The architect scored a 68. This is what I was talking about. Grok gave me a D list actor and I refuse to settle for "close enough" . We kept iterating until it hit 94. Then I made the tester grade itself. Dogfooding. It started at 74. We tested and rewrote it until the scores were consistent and above 90.

That simple idea, force the AI to check its own work, unlocked everything. Combining the Architect with the Tester molded into a evaluation pipeline which then became Jaikey the Ai Mechanic.

Not another chatbot or a“prompt wizard.” A mechanic. Something that inspects, diagnoses, and repairs the AI systems people are building when they don’t have a team of engineers and are learning by watching YouTube videos made by other people who are also learning by watching YouTube videos.

I deliberately didn’t give it a glowing brain or neon robot aesthetic. It’s a mechanic. Because that’s the only metaphor that felt honest.

I’m still new to the game and long road ahead. Jaikey has a handful of users. Some days I feel like I finally know what I’m doing. Most days I still feel like I’m in over my head and start reciting cocktail recipes.

But compared to the guy who thought ChatGPT was a 4chan hack tool and tried to get an AI to rob a bank for him.

Today, Other founders and developers are reaching out to ask me questions about Jaikey. Its slowly starting to come together... hopefully.