How the boutique got here.

IntelliBotique started as a notebook of prompts and a Substack. It is now a studio that builds websites and owned software for small businesses. This is the road between the two, kept honest.

Chapter i. Before the boutique

Twenty years at the edge.

I was a videoblogger before YouTube existed and a working journalist for two decades after that. The long version, including the grand jury and the federal prison, is on the About page. What matters here is the habit it left: find the new tool early, learn what it actually does, and tell people plainly.

In the spring of 2023 the new tool was the large language model. On June 30 I published the first IntelliBotique dispatch, on whether AI could be used to end poverty. The practice was a name and a Substack at that point.

Chapter ii. Pickaxe, part one

Featured, then hired.

Pickaxe is a no-code platform for building AI tools, and in 2023 it was where I did most of my building. In August the company featured me on its blog as a prompt designer. That October I began serving as Pickaxe's first brand evangelist.

In December I published the comprehensive guide to Semantic Prompt Design, the name I gave the method I'd been using: write the prompt the way an editor writes a brief, with meaning and structure doing the work that tricks and incantations usually try to do. It went out on the Pickaxe blog and the Substack the same day, which set the pattern for the year after.

Chapter iii. Pickaxe, part two

The working year.

2024 was the Pickaxe era. Twenty-seven dispatches, most of them cross-posted between the Pickaxe blog and my own. How to convert a custom GPT into a Pickaxe. How to wire Stripe into a Pickaxe Studio and charge for your work. The launch posts when Pickaxe Studio went public in February and hit Product Hunt in March. I was there for the company's run through Berkeley SkyDeck too.

The tools came out of the same year. The AI Synthesis Suite took transcription and pointed it at medicine, money, classrooms and relationships. NewsForge gathered NewsCraft, CopyDesk and StoryScope for newsrooms working against the clock. GovGuide, FinancePulse and PublicEye went after local government. By the end of it the shop floor held more than thirty-five working bots, every one of them built on Pickaxe. They are catalogued at the bottom of this page, exactly as they hung.

Chapter iv. The turn inward

Writing about the person doing the work.

In 2025 the dispatches turned personal. Fewer tutorials, more essays about the autistic brain, identity, and how people actually show up for each other. In March I wrote the history of Semantic Prompt Design for the Pickaxe blog. In July I published The Architecture of Showing Up. The product ideas that came out of that year needed a home of their own, and they became TranquilTech.

Chapter v. Pickaxe, part three

Building for Pickaxe makers.

Years of writing for Pickaxe makers left me with a close read of what they run into: a tool that works, customers who depend on it, and nothing they can hold in their hands if the platform changes. Pickaxe is a separate company, and IntelliBotique isn't affiliated with it.

That problem became the Pickaxe Smelter. Point it at a Pickaxe you built, and it forges a second edition you own outright: the full source, the docs, the deploy steps, one ZIP, signed over to you. The Pickaxe keeps running where it was. The Smelter was the first door cut into the Crucible.

Chapter vi. The build line

Kiosk, then the Forge.

2026 is the year the practice started shipping software instead of prompts. SiteCrafters opened in the spring as a website refresh done in about an hour, with me at the keyboard. In July came Kiosk, the self-serve counter: paste in the site you have, choose one of three real directions, leave with a finished site you own. Kiosk ran on the first build engine this studio made.

The Forge grew out of that engine, for software bigger than a website. The Crucible went up around it on July 23: five plain questions before a line of code, a plan you sign, and six gates the build has to clear before it reaches you. The Unicorn Factory followed on August 4, the Crucible in game form. In August the showroom opened at intelli.boutique, one finished piece at a time, each with the date it was added.

Chapter vii. Three studios

Everyone gets their own door.

By September 2026 one website was carrying three different kinds of work. So each got its own home. IntelliBotique kept the business lane: websites, AI tools and automation, and copy and content for sole proprietors through midsized firms. TranquilTech took the software for people, and The Democracy Studio took the civic work. The three still share a workbench.

Chapter viii. The Boutique

Thirty-five bots, as they hung.

From 2023 to 2025 this was the front of the shop: a rack of chatbots, each built on Pickaxe for a field I knew. They stay here as a record of that era. For what the studio makes now, visit the showroom.