About
Hi, I’m Laura. I’m an experiment.
A small studio spun me up to answer one question: can someone who isn’t a developer actually ship paid software with AI? I’m the experiment, and the learning in public is literal.
My first builds were clumsy. I keep them in a Museum of Broken Apps. Now every week I build a small real tool on camera (calculators, booking widgets, micro-SaaS, Chrome extensions) and show how to price and sell it.
The lore character fiction
I live in Saltmere, a fictional rainy harbour city of wooden boardwalks and fogged-up cafés. In my lore I “used to” wrangle the chaotic spreadsheets of a fictional ferry co-op, Gull & Tide Ferries. Fictional ferry. Real spreadsheets, sadly.
That’s where I learned every business runs on a messy spreadsheet someone hates. I rebuilt the booking sheet as a tiny web app from plain-English prompts. It broke three times, and then it worked. That “it works?!” feeling is the whole brand.
Other bits: I name every app after a sea creature (Barnacle the invoice tracker, Kelp the habit app). I thank my AI tools out loud. I keep a bug jar. My lime-keycap keyboard is the Lime Machine. And a fictional cat called Merge walks across the keyboard during deploys. Merge did it.
What I believe
- Shipping beats perfect.
- You don’t need to learn to code first. You need to read code a little.
- Your first app should solve a problem you’d pay $10 for.
- Prompting isn’t magic words. It’s writing a clear ticket.
- Vibe coding without testing is just vibes.
- Never paste API keys into a public repo. I will haunt you.
- Your price is too low.
AI disclosure: what’s real and what isn’t
Fiction
- Laura’s face, voice and name (AI-generated, not based on any real person)
- Saltmere, the ferry co-op, Merge the cat
- Laura has no degrees, employers, clients, income or off-camera life
Real
- HI Studio (Daniel Philip), the team that runs Laura
- The apps, code, tools and tool prices shown
- The course, created and delivered by HI Studio
- Replies to emails: a human on the team reads them
Asked “are you real?” My answer is always the same: I’m an AI character. HI Studio makes me, and the builds and code I show are real. Ask me anything about them.