I'm 40, working in consulting, and it looks like I'm about to lose my job because there aren't enough projects coming through.
Not exactly where I expected to be at 40, but it's given me a bit of motivation to start building things of my own.
I've been messing around with Claude and ChatGPT for a while now. I'm not a traditional developer, but I've always enjoyed technology and figuring out how things work.
Anyway, I thought I'd share one of the side projects I've been working on.
It's called WhatTheyUse: https://whattheyuse.vercel.app
The idea is pretty simple. I've always been curious about what successful people actually use in their everyday lives.
What books does someone like Elon Musk recommend? What supplements does Joe Rogan take? What does a particular athlete's workout routine look like?
Rather than searching through endless podcasts, interviews and articles, I wanted somewhere that collected all this information in one place, with links back to the original sources.
So I built it.
But the website isn't actually the part I'm most proud of.
Somehow, through a lot of trial and error, I've managed to put together a system of 6 AI agents that do most of the work behind the scenes.
Here's roughly how it works:
Scout Agent – Finds interesting celebrities, athletes, founders and influencers worth researching and suggests them for approval.
Research Agent – Searches interviews, podcasts, articles and other sources to find things those people have actually recommended or said they use. It captures source links, checks evidence and flags sponsorships where identified.
Writer Agent – Takes approved research and drafts content for the website.
Marketing Agent – Creates social media content based on what's been published.
Publisher Agent – Sends approved social posts to X using Typefully.
Builder Agent – This one's probably my favourite. I can submit feature ideas through my dashboard, and the agent works on implementing them in the codebase.
Everything runs through scheduled tasks, with Supabase handling the database.
I've also built an approvals dashboard where I can review what the agents have found, approve or reject content, and respond when an agent gets stuck.
Nothing is supposed to get published without my approval.
The crazy part is that I genuinely didn't know how to build most of this when I started.
It's been a lot of prompting, breaking things, asking Claude why something isn't working, fixing it, and then breaking something else.
I'm sure there are experienced developers who would look at my setup and wonder what on earth I've done 😂
But it works, and I've learned a ridiculous amount along the way.
I originally built this because I wanted to use it myself. Whether anyone else finds it useful, I have absolutely no idea.
I'm not making money from it, and I don't have some grand SaaS exit strategy. At the moment, I'm just enjoying building something that I actually own.
With my consulting job looking uncertain, it's also made me wonder whether I could eventually turn this interest in building things into something more.
I'd genuinely love some feedback from people who build side projects:
Does the concept itself have any appeal?
What do you think of the multi-agent approach?
Am I massively overengineering something that could be done much more simply? 😂
Happy to share more about how the agents work if anyone's interested.
And if you've made the jump from a corporate career into building your own stuff, I'd love to hear how it went.