Building in public
Thoughts on persistent pain, recovery, and the journey of building Bigger Than Pain.
Something clicks inside me and I hop up off the couch, tell my wife that I’m going to build an online course and I will be upstairs in the box room planning this out for the foreseeable future....
I started to set myself deadlines. “By THIS DATE you are gonna have this module and this rehab plan completed.” I’d start in earnest with the planning and writing and I might even get as far as starting to build the slideshow or read a few studies... and then something would show up in life and that deadline would slip by. And I'd do the same again and see another one sail freely by me.I cannot tell you how many times I opened my laptop and the course folder just sat there on the screen looking at me… and I’d end up avoiding it like it was judging me!
I had 2 modules and 2 rehab plans left to complete. I’d been procrastinating for months. What was I saying about deadlines being more like timid suggestions….. This hit more like Thors hammer!!
Something starts the gnaw at me - just beyond my ability to grasp it until it finally clicks. What people really need is ongoing guidance & personalisation. Still im pretty gutted about my launch. Maybe there wasn’t signal within the noise. I felt like I’d built this gigantic “cathedral” and forgotten to add a bloody front door. Maybe I should park this whole thing. But I couldn’t unsee what the real problem was…
Then I run into a brick wall with a complete inability to solve some issues in the code relating to authentication. I’m chatting with Claude about it. He suggests using Claude code, their coding agent. I immediately say - na i cant spend more money on this because I have TWINS arriving any day now and the price of everything is about to double! Then Claude tells me it’s included in my current Claude sub. FFS. I am so new to this all that i dont even know this.
It’s a sunny day about 5pm. I have the twins in the buggy, I’m walking around and around and around our house. Fuelled by 3.5 hours sleep last night (that’s the norm at the moment) and what feels like a vat of coffee I finally come to my decision. It’s time to build an app.
I find out that it needs a thing called docker to run inside an app. Docker reminds me of the docking scene in my favourite movie, interstellar. That’s kinda what it felt like trying to get Learnhouse to work inside my app. Man with no coding experience whatsoever pulls off difficult technical feat to solve a problem. I got it done after many attempts. Move over McConaughey, McGettigans in town...
My chatbot is literally behaving like he’s had a few too many. Making up facts and extrapolating across domains that don’t make sense. And then for no reason at all he forgets what we’ve been chatting about… Apparently (after a quick google) this is a common issue called “hallucination”. This will not do. It will kill my entire app if I can’t get this right. I can handle bugs. I cannot handle bullshit....
Then an idea strikes like a bolt of lightning. I download the 149 page paper and upload the file to the AI project I use to plan my app build. So I do what every person in 2025 does. I ask the LLM to compare what I’m building in my app (and how I’m building it) to what Google's Deepmind paper has suggested is the most effective way to approach building a personal health app. I figure that I’m going to learn something about where my app build is weak and how I can improve it. That’s a win in my book. I’m waiting for the AI system's response… This could go either way 🤷🏻♂️
Remember that online course I built that took me 4 years to complete. Yeah well that beast references over 150 research studies across all the typical domains you’d think: Pain Movement & Rehabilitation Mindset Self regulation Common body part misunderstandings & misconceptions And now I have a way to leverage all of this into the strongest trust signal a person with pain can find.
What i hadn't realised is that I had jumped the lobster out of the boiling pot of water into the pot beside it that was heating up just a little bit more slowly....
I read about Andrej Karpathy building his own ChatGPT from scratch for about a hundred quid. "I'll have some of that," I thought. Then came the dose of reality I badly needed...
Of course, I wished I had Harry's invisibility cloak to cover me up when those emails from paying users landed in my inbox describing the issues they had experienced.
