Let me tell you about the bug that made me doubt myself more than any other in this series. I’d fix something — say, a misheard word in a transcript. I’d save the corrected file to the server. I’d open the app on my phone to admire the fix. And the old, wrong word would still be sitting there. So I’d fix it again. Save again. Still wrong. I started to wonder if I’d forgotten how to edit a text file. ...
While working on this project, I had to transcribe and edit hundreds of audio files — 145 at first, later almost 400 — using a paid AI service. Each file cost real money. The whole job took hours, sometimes even overnight. If you’ve ever started a long task where each step costs money, you know the worry. Three problems can happen, and I ran into all three before I learned how to prepare for them. ...
In an earlier post I described cloning an app — copying the audio player I’d built onto a tablet to give away. That was a copy: same content, same speaker, a second home. This post is about a step further. I took that same engine and pointed it at a different speaker, and then at a different kind of media — and it just worked. Each time, what should have been “build a whole new app” turned out to be “feed the engine something new.” ...
In the post on search I gave you the clean version: type a word, get every place it was said, tap to jump to that moment. That’s true now. But I made it sound smooth, and for a while it wasn’t. The search had a bug that wore me down — and tracking it down taught me one of the more useful lessons in this series. The symptom was maddening. You’d search a word, see a result, tap “play from here” — and the audio would start playing twenty minutes before the word you searched for. The search found the right thing. It just sent you to the wrong place in the recording. Sometimes by seconds, sometimes by twenty whole minutes. ...
In an earlier post I turned hundreds of hours of recorded Bible teaching into text. AI transcription is good, but not perfect — it mishears words, especially names and rare terms. So the obvious next step was to ask a smart language model to clean up the mistakes. These models have basically read the whole Bible, so I figured fixing a few scripture typos would be easy for them. It wasn’t. And the way it failed taught me something that goes well beyond transcripts — to anyone using AI to correct text against a trusted source. ...
I save every prompt I type when I’m building something. I started doing it long before this blog, for a dull reason: I forget what I did, and the log helps me pick things back up. Going back through one of those logs recently, I found a session worth sharing. It’s closer to what building with AI actually feels like than a clean demo is. The demos show you the good moment. You describe what you want, and a working app appears. That does happen, and it’s real. But most of the work isn’t that. A lot of it is more like this: a task that looked easy, and an AI that got it wrong a few times before we sorted it out. ...
I thought I was done. The tablet was in his hands. The ownership was his — his domain, his account, his server. A lifetime of teaching, gathered and searchable. I’d built a legacy and given it away. The end. And then, at that very handover, the eighty-year-old man told me what was missing. There were teachings, he said, that we didn’t have — recordings that belonged in his life’s work but weren’t in our collection. He knew, because it’s his life’s work, and no one knows it better than the man who lived it. So the “finished” gift wasn’t finished. The tablet is back on my desk right now, plugged in, getting its update. On Sunday I hand it back: Version 2.0. ...
In the last post I handed an eighty-year-old man a tablet holding his life’s work — every recorded teaching, transcribed and searchable, in a box he could hold. It was, I thought, a finished gift. It wasn’t, quite. And the reason taught me something about what “giving” really means. The tablet was in his hands. But the web address his teachings lived at was registered to me. The account that kept the whole thing reachable from the internet was mine. So in a quiet, hidden way, it was still my server — just sitting in his living room. A gift isn’t really given until it’s owned, and to finish, two hidden things had to change hands. ...
Everything in this series so far — the app, the tablet, Termux, the transcription, the search — was really the how. This post is the why. And the why is a person. He is eighty this year. For decades he has studied the Bible and explained it to others, twice a week, online, asking nothing in return. He once told his listeners that you shouldn’t walk out your front door in the morning before you read the Bible. That’s the kind of man he is. He gives people their daily bread, every day, and then steps out of the way. ...
I built an audio app once. Then I built the same app again — and the second time took an afternoon. Not because I’m fast. Because I didn’t really build it again. I cloned it. I took the thing I already had, copied it onto a different machine, pointed it at a different home, and turned it on. That sounds ordinary until you notice you can’t do it with the apps you use every day. You can’t clone Netflix onto a relative’s device. You can’t copy your Spotify and hand it to a friend. The big apps are sealed boxes you rent access to. But software you build is yours, which means you can make copies of it the way you’d copy a key. ...