Why “AI everywhere” made me build the opposite.

Every other day I see a new app shipped overnight: AI agents, vibe-coded dashboards, “just add ChatGPT” everything. I respect the speed. But it also made something obvious to me. The next wave of tools won’t win because they ship the fastest. They’ll win because people trust them enough to live inside them daily.

So I’m building Clean Core, a calm, local-first project workspace for small studios and solo creators, and I’m intentionally not leading with AI. Not because I’m anti-AI. Because my differentiation is on a different axis entirely: restraint, reliability, and craft.

A lot of modern “productivity” software has turned into endless features, endless notifications, endless integrations, and endless “smart” suggestions. It looks impressive in a demo, but it’s exhausting to actually use. Vibe-coding makes this worse in one specific way. It’s easier than ever to ship something that looks finished without building a tool someone can depend on day after day.

My plan to stand out in this wave is simple. First, restraint is the feature. Clean Core is designed to be a workspace you can open every day without feeling mentally taxed. Fewer moving parts. Fewer decisions per click. Fewer setups before you can actually work. I’m optimizing for clarity over cleverness.

Second, local-first is a trust contract. I’m building for the reality of small teams and creators where work happens at weird hours, internet is not always reliable, privacy matters, and “the tool is down” is unacceptable. Your projects should open instantly, work offline, and feel stable. That is the baseline.

Third, it’s designed by use, not by trend. I didn’t start Clean Core because it’s a good market. I started it because I needed it. I’ve used hundreds of tools, and the difference between “nice idea” software and “daily driver” software is that the builder actually lives in it. If I wouldn’t use a feature for eight hours a day, it doesn’t ship.

This isn’t vapor, either. Clean Core is already usable end-to-end as a product foundation. It has a dashboard and projects system, a project details modal and core UI flows, archive, settings, help, and stable navigation with a responsive layout. It’s not an idea. It’s a tool that’s becoming sharper through use.

Just as important is what I’m not doing. I’m not bolting an AI assistant onto a generic to-do list and calling it innovation. I’m not chasing a thousand integrations before the core experience is rock solid. I’m not optimizing for hype. I’m optimizing for a tool that feels inevitable once you try it. Speed is easy. Taste is hard. Trust is hardest.

AI is useful and I’m not pretending otherwise. But I think a lot of products use AI as the identity instead of using it as a tool. If AI shows up in Clean Core, it’ll be because it helps the user do something concrete, not because the market expects an “AI” label on the homepage.

I want to pressure-test this with people who actually ship. If you were a solo creator or a 1–5 person studio, what would make you trust a brand-new project/workspace tool enough to switch? Is it offline reliability, simplicity, import paths, pricing, something else? If this resonates and you want to follow along, I’m collecting early-access emails and I’m happy to DM a link or a demo clip.