The build, day by day·Tuesday 21 July 2026

A hard day with the camera

Some days the work is finding out why a thing that should work does not. The camera flow died silently on real hardware and took four goes to pin down. It behaves now, and it left something useful behind: every build of the app shows exactly what changed in it, so a fix can be checked against the build you are actually holding.

A rule for us rather than the app was set the same day: no piles of planning documents. The plan lives in one place, and the work is tracked where the work is.

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Day by day

Where it stands: it records, uploads, works out what you meant and suggests what to do next. It has started learning the business it works for. One firm uses it every day while we toughen it. Not in the App Store yet. Aiming for September 2026.

18 Jul — Day one. One red button that records. First rule written down: never lose a take.
19 Jul — It records from the side button with the phone locked. Every take goes up to our server, and we check it arrived whole. Bugs get reported by pressing the button and saying so.
20 Jul — It starts picking jobs, materials and prices out of what you say. Receipts by camera.
21 Jul — A hard day with the camera. Four tries before it behaved. Every build now shows what changed in it.
22 Jul — This website goes up. A web twin of the button, so every change is tested in two places.
23 Jul — The suggestions inbox: it proposes, you say yes or bin it. We build it a marked exam, scored on its worst answer.
24 Jul — A day spent writing down, in plain words, what this thing actually does and does not do.
25 Jul — The rules for earning trust get written: it drafts, you press send. Every action asks first until it has earned better.
26 Jul — Four recording bugs found by using it on real jobs. All fixed, with tests so they stay fixed. The six o’clock morning sweep switches on.
27 Jul — The locked-phone puzzle cracked: press the side button, the screen stays dark, it records and uploads anyway. Missed transcriptions get a second chance. Fixed a rare bug where two copies of one upload could tangle.
28 Jul — A night of field tests. Eight takes on a locked phone: none lost. Learned when iPhones really allow background sending, and planned around it.
29 Jul — It now reads the company knowledge before deciding what a note means, and offers to save new facts it hears — nothing is saved without a yes. Field tests on holiday Wi-Fi: locked-phone takes landed in under a minute, and one recorded in airplane mode arrived all by itself.
30 Jul — Caught a ghost: an old broken upload the phone had been retrying for days, wasting data. It now spots and cancels those, and stops doubting a take the server already holds. And the change log inside the app now reads in plain English, like this one.

Plain words on purpose. Tap a day for the whole story.