Where Curious Coach Tools came from

Jironaut and Worthsmith didn’t start life as “apps”.

They started as copied-and-pasted prompts.

At work, I kept running into the same kinds of problems:
tickets that were technically fine but conceptually fuzzy, conversations that jumped straight to solutions, decisions being made without surfacing assumptions or trade-offs. None of this was due to bad intent - just pressure, pace, and the reality of working in complex systems.

To help myself, I began writing prompts.
Not clever ones - just practical questions I could paste into a chat window to slow my own thinking down a little:

• What problem are we actually trying to solve?
• What are we assuming is true?
• What would make this harder than it looks?

Over time, I noticed two things.

First, these weren’t just my problems. When I shared the prompts with colleagues, the response was usually some version of: “Oh - that’s exactly the question we should be asking.”

Second, the prompts worked best when they behaved less like instructions and more like a quiet coach: nudging, reframing, asking just enough to make you think without telling you what to do.

That’s where this site - and these tools - come from.

From prompts to tools

Around the same time, I picked up Vibe Coding by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge. I enjoyed the first couple of chapters, but then found myself doing something slightly unexpected: instead of reading on, I started building.

It felt easier to turn an idea into a small, rough tool than to fully internalise the theory first. So I took one of those prompts and turned it into my first “vibe-coded” experiment: Jironaut. What was my goal? Just to figure out a bit about all this AI excitement, and for the fun of building something again.