# Your Personal Project

Every person in this class is working toward one thing: a personal project that solves some problem in your life, or that you just think would be cool. There are no wrong answers, but let's collaborate and learn about what's possible as we go, so there's a good chance you'll like the results. We call it your *personal project*. It's the through-line of everything else we do.

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## How to think about it

A personal project is **something you want to exist** — that doesn't currently exist for you in a form that works.

It can be small. It probably *should* be small to start. The goal is not to build a startup. The goal is to take one piece of friction out of your life and replace it with something you control.

Some shapes a personal project can take:

- A script that takes a folder of messy files and renames or organizes them by content.
- A tool that searches your photos by what's in them, not by date or filename.
- An assistant that reads a long PDF (a contract, a manual, a research paper) and answers your specific questions about it.
- A workflow that pulls data from somewhere you check often and gives you a summary on a schedule.
- A small program that does one tedious thing your job currently asks you to do by hand.
- An interface for a hobby — your books, your recipes, your training data, your woodworking inventory.
- Something for someone you care about — a parent who can't navigate menus, a kid who'd love a custom learning tool.

None of those are a *requirement*. They're just to get the shape across.

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## You don't need one yet

You do not need to walk in knowing what your project is.

Most people don't, the first time they're asked. Friction in your own life is often invisible — you've adapted around it for so long that you no longer see it as friction. Part of what we'll work on together is **noticing**.

Helpful questions, to sit with rather than answer immediately:

- What do I do every week that I find tedious?
- What information do I keep losing track of?
- What is something I wish my computer would just *do*, that it doesn't?
- If I had a tireless, patient assistant who could read, write, and run code, what's the first thing I'd point them at?

If something rises to the top, write it down. If nothing does, that's also fine. Bring an open mind to the next session and we'll work on it together.

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## What we (the instructors) actually do

We are not graders. We are collaborators with more practice than you have at this specific thing.

Concretely, our role is to:

- **Help you see what's possible.** Most of the limits you imagine on your devices are not real. We'll show you the real ones.
- **Help you frame the problem.** A vague wish ("I wish my email was less of a mess") becomes a tractable project ("a script that flags all unread email older than 30 days from senders I've never replied to") — but that translation is a skill, and we have it.
- **Get you unstuck.** When something fails — and things will fail — we help you debug, redirect, or pick a different approach.
- **Push back when it helps.** If your project is too ambitious for the time you have, or too small to be worth the work, we'll say so. You can ignore us.

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## What we *don't* do

- We don't pick your project for you.
- We don't write your project for you. AI will do most of the writing; you do the steering. We help with the steering.
- We don't grade or evaluate your project. There is no rubric.
- We don't lock you into any particular tool, vendor, or stack. Your project is yours, on your machine, in formats you control.

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## A closing note

If at the end of this class you have a small thing running on your computer that does one useful thing for *you* specifically — something that didn't exist before, that you can keep using or modify whenever you want — then this class worked. That's the whole bar.
