We all know what it's like. People want to chat. People have questions. But sometimes people = many and Aidan = just one guy who occasionally needs to take a nice little snooze.

So, I built Aidan 2.0.

I designed it to look like iMessage because, well, familiarity is comforting. Plus it makes people feel like they're actually messaging with a real human (plot twist: they're not).

The technical bits: It's built in Django/Python with plain old HTML, CSS and JS, I used Cursor to help me code faster (AI helping me build AI me—very meta), crafted the front-end in Figma and spent approximately 347 hours fine-tuning the core prompt to make it sound just like me. Turns out teaching a bot to be dry without being mean is surprisingly difficult.

After v1, I discovered an unexpected feature: emptying my bank account. The API calls added up. So I added some preset questions and responses to keep costs down while maintaining the illusion of my digital presence.

The impact:

- I can now sleep through meetings (kidding... mostly)

- People get responses even when I'm busy making actual things

- I've learned more about how I communicate than any personality test could teach me

It turns out the best way to understand how you sound to others is to build a robot version of yourself and then realise it uses way too many em dashes—just like this.

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