“Just let it go, brother.”

Burning Man, sometime in the nineties. I was explaining to someone that I design products for a living. That was her entire answer. I registered this domain when I got home and have kept it for thirty years.

I don’t want to own products. I build the thing that makes them possible — and then I let it go.

That sounds like a pose until you look at what actually reached people. So here it is in that order: what got into someone’s hands, where the invention really happened, and what I’m building now.

In a hurry? What I’m building now →

Things that reached people

1997 — now
01
A guide for a pool cue Wood, two turned wheels, and a green suede loop that stands in for the bridge hand you can’t make with one working arm. It rolls with the stroke instead of dragging. My design throughout, made for a rehabilitation distributor.
~1,200 made and sold · 1997–2001
02
Butter Rugs A slipmat built for the fastest hands in turntablism, made for DJ QBert in partnership with Thud Rumble. I later licensed the technology to them and they have made it ever since. Still on shelves twenty-five years later, now in its third version.
15,000 a year, every year, for the sixteen
years I made them · 1998–2014
03
An art-supply business My own brand, sold into the United States and Canada. I built the storefront five times over and automated the operation piece by piece until it stopped needing me. It has run without me for years. I manage it from my phone.
runs unattended 2001 — present

The invention is never the product

The method
1999

A veterans’ hospital handed me a hydration problem: someone with quadriplegia needs a straw with three flexible joints. No manufacturer would make one, so I built a tool to join three straws. The device stayed a prototype. The tool walked into a toy company’s boardroom two years later.

1998

A brochure holder was needed for a famous computer’s launch, and nothing would attach to the machine. So I stopped attaching things to the machine. A puddle-shaped mousepad with a clear tube rising out of it. Ten thousand made.

Earlier

A machine everyone had relied on for years was wired wrong, because the person who built it left with the only manual and nobody read his handwriting. I listened to how it was being used. Rewiring it doubled what it could carry, and the fix went to the rest.

What I’m building now

2026
01
Nittim Tells you whether software written with AI is safe to put in front of real people — security, privacy, and the parts that quietly break in production.
Tech details
  • Deterministic first. Secret and known-vulnerability scanners read the code before any model does. The AI grades a thirteen-category framework, and code has the last word — it can never rate software safer than the scanners found.
  • Three doors. A REST API, a GitHub Action that fails a build on the verdict, and an MCP server so an agent can ask for an audit mid-task.
  • Tests that test the tests. A mutation-probe registry deliberately breaks the codebase to prove the suite notices. 335 test files. Row-level security live on every table, verified in the database, not in a document.
  • Untrusted code runs in a sandbox. Enterprise brings its own cloud keys, single sign-on and SARIF output.
live · takes payments
02
Mira A steady companion for parents raising autistic children, in Hebrew and English, awake at three in the morning.
Tech details
  • Evals that run offline, in CI. Twelve suites, forty-six gated metrics, replayed with no network and no key. A regression against the committed baseline fails the build.
  • Safety in code, not in the prompt. No diagnosing, no dosing, no dangerous fringe treatments — refused on the server whatever the model says.
  • A kill switch per external service. Half the daily budget alerts; all of it disables automatically.
  • Hebrew and English, right-to-left throughout. No third-party analytics ever touch a conversation.
live · takes payments
03
PullMe Translation for the thirty-four languages the large engines skip — every published word typed by a person who speaks it, and that person is paid a share of the site’s subscription.
Tech details
  • Verify-to-publish. Nothing reaches the public until a person who speaks the language approves it. The system learns each translator’s voice, and what they rejected, separately per client.
  • Eleven hand-off formats, plus a pull API, a one-line embed, an SEO proxy with hreflang, and a WordPress plugin.
  • “Supported” means measured. A language is supported only once it carries a golden eval set; until then it is preview. Capability and measured quality are kept apart.
  • Migrations never run themselves. The deploy fails if production’s schema is behind, and a build guard fails if client code can reach a server-only module.
live · takes payments
04
Debait Share a headline that baited you and read the same story told straight, from the primary source — or an honest “there’s nothing clean under this.” Sometimes the right answer is a refusal, and it says so.
Tech details
  • Refusal is a first-class outcome. The shared article is only a pointer — never reproduced or reworded. The story is rebuilt from primary sources that want to be read. About four shares in five resolve; the rest get the honest no.
  • Two phases. Find and verify, then write — a fresh resolve in about fifteen seconds, and a known event is near-free the second time.
  • Hardened where it fetches. A server-side guard checks every redirect hop; a kill switch pauses the model and keeps serving cached cards; a daily pager watches the failure alarm.
  • Anonymous by design. An unguessable device id is the only credential for your own reading history. It expires in seven days and deletes in one tap.
live · takes payments
05
Guardian Her phone rings and the first screen shows her who it is — a stranger, or her daughter. One button, and she decides. In Hebrew or Russian, so the choice stays hers. A ringing phone has two buttons, and the only help that counts is owning both. Everything else is theater; an app can reach neither. In pilot, Guardian holds the red one: a call she declines or lets ring comes to it, and she reads in Russian who it was and what they wanted. The green one still hands her to whoever is calling, and only her carrier can take it — the line is theirs, and everything needed already sits inside their network. A feature away, not a product away.
Tech details
  • Telephony, not an app. It sits on the carrier’s forwarding leg. A caller is never bridged to her directly, and the real call to her never fires without verification or her consent.
  • Nothing is kept. Audio is transcribed, judged and discarded — no recordings, no voiceprints.
  • The verdict is computed in code. The model informs it and never decides it. A caller who won’t cooperate fails closed.
  • Held-out evals. Prompts are tuned only against a development split; only the holdout number is ever quoted. Full recall and precision on the current corpus, a decision in under four seconds.
red button in pilot ·
green waiting on Cellcom
06
Trippy A trip-research companion — browse hotels, flights, and activities the way you already do, and it tells you whether a page is worth your time. No vendor can pay to rank higher, so the answer only ever answers to you.
Tech details
  • The account is the device. A mobile app with its own in-app browser, a Chrome extension for the desktop, one backend, one profile.
  • Money is never an input to ranking. Fit to your profile only. Paid placement lives in a separate rail, labelled as such.
  • You are charged what the server held. The amount is computed only from the server-persisted price; a regression test proves a tampered client can’t move it.
  • A judge from another family. Rubric runs are cross-checked by an independent model of a different lineage, behind a boundary that keeps real trip data from ever reaching it. A canary panel of deliberately bad plans must always be caught, or the run refuses to report.
live
07
Baru A translator for the subtext everyone assumes you can hear. Built for autistic adults, useful for anyone who has ever left a conversation unsure what just happened.
Tech details
  • The model suggests, code decides. Every count and confidence is computed in a pure, deterministic module. The model’s own arithmetic is never trusted or shown.
  • The browser sees no key and no prompt. Both live behind a server proxy.
  • Supported mode. A caregiver sees only what the wearer consents to — both sides opt in, text only.
  • A live-whisper prototype, run Wizard-of-Oz style: a clue and two readings, never a verdict. The wearer’s stop erases the room.
gated
08
MedComply Clinic management for Israeli private practitioners and supervised rehab organisations — records kept in the national FHIR standard, an audit trail an inspector could verify on a disconnected laptop, payments built in — and the full system is free until July 2027. My first build, and the hardest domain.
Tech details
  • FHIR at the gate. Records held in the national IL-Core profile and exported as standard bundles on demand — aligned with the 2027 Mobility Law ahead of time.
  • An audit trail an inspector can verify offline. Every log row and attestation is cryptographically signed and checkable against a published key, on a disconnected laptop.
  • Patient data stays home. Storage in Israel; the AI and speech steps run only in EU regions covered by adequacy, and only after local pseudonymisation.
  • Seven care-team roles, defined as data, not code. A consent signature stores the stroke path and a hash of the agreed text — never timing, pressure or IP address.
pre-pilot
09
And the quiet ones The ones I can’t show yet — a family of them, built on one idea. Patent filings are in process. Ask me in person.
in process

One rule runs through all of them.

Each is built so it cannot be corrupted in my favour. The audit tool cannot be talked into a better grade. The translator publishes nothing a person hasn’t checked, and that person is paid for the checking.

The question a reasonable person asks about any of this is why they would trust an answer from a system whose owner benefits from a particular answer. So none of mine can.

Five of these take payments. One is in pilot with real users. And the business above has run without me for years — still the one that pays the bills. The rest are built and waiting for the right hands. I am better at building the thing than at owning it — which is the whole point of the name, and also its honest limit.