About Me

I’m Ian Simon

I’ve been working in technology for around 30 years, and coaching for close to 20 -first athletes, then with work. Most of that time, those two threads ran in parallel: building systems, teams, and platforms on one side; helping people think, learn, and improve on the other.

The recent advent of AI has given me an opportunity to bring those two streams of my life together.

This site is a place to document my adventures and experiments in building small, useful tools that use AI to coach and teach - not to do the work for you.

Why this exists

I’m interested in tools that:

• Help people think more clearly
• Ask better questions
• Build skill through practice
• Support judgement rather than replace it

I’m much less interested in tools that promise to:

• Automate thinking away
• Produce “perfect” answers
• Turn complex human problems into simple prompts

Most of what you’ll find here sits somewhere between experiment and working prototype. That’s deliberate.

Tools and experiments

You’ll see two broad kinds of things on this site:

• Tools – things that feel “done enough” to be useful, even if they’re still evolving
• Lab experiments – ideas I’m testing, half-built coaches, and prototypes that may or may not stick

If something is in the lab, treat it as exactly that: an experiment.

My working assumption about AI

My current belief (which I fully expect to change) is that AI is at its most valuable when it acts as:

• A coach
• A mirror
• A prompt for reflection

…and at its worst when it pretends to be an expert, authority, or replacement for human judgement.

These tools are my way of exploring that belief in practice.

A note on polish

This is not a product company, a consultancy site, or a content engine.

Things here may be:

• Rough around the edges
• Opinionated
• Incomplete

That’s part of the point.

If you’re curious, thoughtful, and interested in how people actually learn and work, you’ll probably feel at home.