Journal

So here's the thing — I bought a domain name. My name. adamsobczyk.com. And honestly, it feels a lot like buying a piece of land.

Think about it. A physical address is limited. You can't build two homes at the same location. Nobody else can claim it once it's yours. A domain name works the same way — and there's nothing more personal than your own name. I felt like I had to grab it. Not because I had a plan, but because the address itself matters to me. It can't be replicated. It can't be repeated.

I bought the field. The ground. The home is not here yet. There isn't even an idea for a home. I don't know why I need one, or if I really do. I just felt like this address is important.

And to be honest? It's been a pretty fun experience. The moment it was mine, something sparked. All these ideas started swirling around — what should I do with this? What could this become? I love that feeling. The blank canvas feeling. The possibility.

I'm an entrepreneurial mind. I've built a couple of projects and startups in my life. Even in the company I work at now — a huge corporation — I'm kind of the entrepreneur within. Everyone sees it. It's not hard to observe. That restless energy, always building something. This website, this journal, it's a fruit of that same energy.

And what you're reading right now? It's not even writing in the traditional sense. I'm speaking to an AI, voice-to-text, raw thoughts flowing out. Then it goes through a system that transforms it into something readable. The fact that you're actually reading this — I'm genuinely impressed. I wouldn't read it. Some random guy's text? In 2026? When we live in an era of short videos and shrinking attention spans? Nobody wants to read anymore.

So yeah, this is kind of a hipster thing. But then again — I've always been a bit rebellious.

Consider this the intro. Enjoy.

Day one. And I'm already writing the second chapter. I don't know what to think about that.

But here's the fun part — from the moment I saw a friend's LinkedIn post with his own name as a domain, to the moment this website was live and working and looking exactly the way I wanted it to... one hour. One. Hour. That's it. The idea sparked, I grabbed it, I built it, and now you're reading it.

This is unbelievable to me. And I work in AI. I'm someone who can call himself an expert in the space. Though — and this is the honest part — I can't really tell you what I'm an expert in. AI is getting so wide as a term that saying "I'm an AI expert" is like saying "I'm a finance expert." Cool, but what does that actually mean? You're probably good at one very specific slice of finance. Or you're not really an expert at all — you just know a little about a lot, which is the same as knowing nothing.

If I had to pin it down, I'd say this: I know how to get things done with AI. Faster and better than what was possible before. Before the first ChatGPT release. That's my thing. The fact that a software release created a new era — a literal new chapter in the world — says a lot about the world we live in.

I'm just talking to a computer. The rest is being done automatically. And somehow, you're reading a finished product.

This whole experience is seamless. I spend maybe 15, 30 minutes on this. And definitely not on "writing" in the way you'd imagine. It's voice-to-text. Raw thoughts. The system does the rest. I know close to nothing about building web applications. I mean — not nothing nothing, but I'd never be able to do this without the tools I have under my fingers right now.

And that got me thinking.

Let's say you're building a house. You can build a pretty good one — but only with advanced machinery. Take away the tools, and you can't do it with your bare hands. So are you good at building houses? Or do you know shit about it because without the machinery you're useless?

I think I'm good at building web applications. Look at what I built. Look at how fast I built it. Maybe it's not the best house on the block, but it's standing, it works, and I like how it looks. The tools made it possible — but I still had to know what to build and how to direct the process. That counts for something. Right?

I keep coming back to the house metaphor. Maybe it's my roots. Maybe it's because building things — whether physical or digital — scratches the same itch.

But here's where it gets uncomfortable. This journal is deeply personal. My name is in the URL. My thoughts are on the page. A good AI system could read everything I've written here and build a pretty accurate psychological profile. Five years from now, someone could know exactly what I believe, how I think, what decisions I'd make, how to convince me of something. How to scam me.

That's a real risk. And I'm aware of it.

If I did a pragmatic risk assessment — negative outcomes versus positive outcomes — it tips negative. Logically, I should not be doing this. The downside is concrete and the upside is... vibes? Self-expression? Some vague sense of fulfillment?

I'm fully aware that I'm doing something that rationally doesn't make sense. And I'm doing it anyway. Which makes me irrational. Maybe that's just who I am.

So let's see how this unfolds.

Third hour. Three hours since this whole thing started existing, and I'm already on chapter three. If you're reading this, I hope you started from the beginning. Chapter one. These aren't standalone pieces — they build on each other. Like a book. That's the whole point.

In the last chapter I talked about the risk. How someone could read all of this and build a psychological profile of me. How that's objectively a bad idea. And I stand by that — it's still irrational. But here's what I've been thinking since then.

Every technology has a positive and a negative use case. The same data that could be used to scam me could also be used to understand me. Really understand me. And not just me.

Here's the thing — I started this journal without overthinking it. No business plan, no strategy. I just felt a need to do it. Couldn't even fully explain it to myself. But the need was there, and it was strong enough that I acted on it. That matters. Because if I felt it, and I'm not special — which I believe is a pretty safe assumption — then other people feel it too.

I am not special. And in this context, that's the most interesting thing about me.

Imagine this scales. Imagine hundreds, thousands of people doing exactly what I'm doing right now — talking into their phone, raw thoughts pouring out, and a system turns it into something structured. Every day. Every week. Over time, you'd build a massive database of real personas. Not survey data. Not focus group answers. Real, unfiltered human thinking captured over months and years.

Now imagine you could build psychological profiles from that. Thousands of them. Millions, eventually. Profiles that represent real types of people — how they think, what they value, what triggers their decisions. And then you go to Apple and say: "You're designing the next iPhone. You're debating the shape, the color, the features. Here are a million real psychological profiles. Run your concepts against them. See what resonates." Not with 100% accuracy — but with way more accuracy than whatever they're doing now.

That's a business. That generates revenue. That builds value.

And this is where the entrepreneurial brain kicks in and the rational brain tries to keep up. Because I know — I know — that ideas are cheap. I've been around the block enough times to understand that the idea is maybe 1% of the equation. Product-market fit is everything. It's the thing that kills 99% of awesome ideas. It's what separates a daydream from a company.

Product-market fit is everything. This is what kills all the awesome ideas. This is what separates dreaming from building.

So the question isn't "is this a cool idea?" — it obviously is, at least to me. The question is: can I validate it with minimal effort? And is the effort low enough that it's worth the bet? Because there are so many assumptions stacked on top of each other here that the whole thing could collapse at any layer.

But here's what I can do right now. I can be my own test case.

I'm going to keep talking. Keep feeding this journal. And then I'm going to try to build a psychological model of myself based purely on what I've said here. Then I'll test it. Ask it questions about things I've never mentioned — my favorite colors, what I like to eat, how I'd react in a specific situation. If the model gets it right, or even close to right, that's signal. That's a data point that says this approach might actually work.

And yeah — full disclosure — I'm recording this chapter while playing Call of Duty. That's the level of attention this journal is getting. But maybe that's the point. Maybe that's exactly what makes it authentic. You don't sit down with a leather-bound notebook and a fountain pen to capture your real thoughts. You ramble into your phone between respawns.

If this works for me — distracted, half-focused, talking into my phone while gaming — it works for anyone.

Will it work? I don't know. Maybe I'll mess up the implementation. Maybe the models aren't good enough yet. Maybe in two years they will be. But if it works, it validates the technical side. The business side is a whole different mountain to climb — and there are many, many assumptions between here and "this is a real company."

But fuck it. Let's see.

Day two. And the fireworks have stopped.

Yesterday was all spark and adrenaline. Today? The emotions settled. Stabilized. And honestly, that's not a bad thing — because now I can actually think. Look at this from a distance instead of standing inside the explosion.

So let's think. There's a framework in building things — a classic one — called "fake it till you make it." The idea is simple: you sell something that doesn't exist yet, just to see if anyone gives a shit. If they do, you build it. If they don't, you saved yourself months of wasted effort.

I love this concept. It has risks, sure. Someone might feel lied to. Reputational damage, blah blah. But let's be real — in business, everyone is overselling what they have. It's not a scandal, it's the standard. Companies do it every single day. The real risks are different: that you can't actually deliver what you promised, or that the people who want it need it today and won't wait for you to figure it out.

But here's the thing — you're not trying to deliver. Not yet. You're gathering signal. You're testing the market.

You don't need a product to validate a product idea. You need a reaction.

Now — this idea from the last chapter needs a name. "AI Journal" was the first thing that came to mind, but it's too generic. Not hipster enough. So let me try this: Artificial Journal. Because what is this, really? It's an artificial version of a physical journal. A digital representation of something that, in my head, is a leather-bound book on paper. "Artificial" from artificial intelligence. I like it. It clicks.

If the Artificial Journal were to become real, we'd need to fake it till we make it. And the "it" has two sides.

Side one: the users. People who would use the journal for free. And why would they? Same reason people use any social media — they trade their privacy for the feeling of being heard. That's the deal. It's not new. It's not controversial. It's how the entire internet works. You get a platform, they get your data. Except here, the data (I belive) is something way more interesting than your shopping habits.

Side two: the money. Big corporations. The Apples of the world. They'd pay — and pay a lot — to access psychological profiles of a huge population of real people. Not survey responses. Not focus group bullshit. Real, unfiltered human thinking that they can run their products and strategies against. One deal with one of these companies? That's the kind of money that makes a living. And if we're being ambitious — why not? — it could be much more than that.

Two sides of the same coin. One gives their thoughts for free. The other pays a fortune to understand them.

So if we're faking it — and we are — we'd need to build something to show these corporations. A value proposition. A pitch deck, a promo video, something that communicates the idea when you're sitting across from whoever holds the budget. That part? That's the easy part. I can build a deck in my sleep.

The hard part is getting in front of those people.

LinkedIn is the obvious channel, but let's be honest — LinkedIn is shit. More and more people are leaving it. What's actually getting traction right now is X. The old Twitter. It's becoming what LinkedIn used to pretend to be — a place where real professionals actually post real thoughts. More authentic, less corporate cringe. But I'm not trying to start a platform war here.

Then there's the non-digital route. Conferences. Walking up to someone and pitching them face-to-face. Old school, but it works. Especially for an idea this unconventional — you almost need the in-person energy to sell it.

So yeah. That's more or less how you'd build a business from day one with nothing but an idea. You name it. You frame the value. You build the pitch. You find the people. And you sell what doesn't exist yet.

Consider this chapter a business lesson from someone who hasn't built the successful business yet. Take it or leave it.

Now — will I actually do any of this? I don't know. Day two energy is real. The enthusiasm from yesterday took a bit of a dive. I'm occupied with other things. I'm cutting weight right now, running a calorie deficit, and let me tell you — that does not exactly fuel the entrepreneurial fire. Hard to change the world when your body is screaming for carbs.

But the idea is here. Written down. Timestamped. And if it goes anywhere, this is the chapter where it started taking shape.

Cheers.

I'm a big fan of investments. Like — a massive fan. Because to me, money is the game. Not a game I love for its own sake, but the game we all got drafted into the moment we were born into this world. These are the rules. These are the points on the scoreboard. And within that game, investing is the thing that changes everything.

Sure, how much you can earn actively matters. Of course it does. But no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you pull in with a salary or a business — if you can't invest, you will never win this game. You'll just be running on a treadmill with better shoes.

I got into this early. I was around 16 when the interest sparked. And by 18, the first thing I did with real money was open an investment account. Then I lost all of it. Every last złoty I'd earned from my first job.

That was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I got to feel the full emotional weight of losing everything — while the "everything" was still small.

That pain? At that amount? It was the cheapest education I ever got. If you're going to learn the hard lesson, learn it when the stakes are manageable. Learn it before there's a mortgage attached to your decisions.

Now — fast forward to today. The markets are fucked. Genuinely, visibly fucked. There are black swan events stacked on top of each other to the point where they stop being black swans and start being scheduled programming. The recession is sitting right there, in front of everyone, and it just keeps getting pushed and pushed and pushed. And when that next dump comes — and it's coming — I think it's going to be one of the biggest we've seen in our lifetime. 2008 will look like a warm-up.

Am I 100% certain? No. Nobody ever is. But the signals are loud. I don't want to break them down here, that's not the point of this chapter, and honestly I don't have the energy for it.

The point is: why sit and wait? Waiting costs money. Inflation is eating your cash while you try to be "careful."

And that's how, for the first time in my life, I ended up inside Treasury bonds.

And I am amazed by what these things are. This is the safest investment you can find on this planet. Basically 100% risk-free. The only way a US Treasury bond fails is if the entire financial world we live in collapses — and if that happens, your portfolio isn't your biggest problem anyway. So if you remove the apocalypse from the equation, these things are bulletproof.

Here's the part that blew my mind.

Before I really understood Treasury bonds, I assumed inflation was the floor. The minimum you'd lose by doing nothing. If inflation is 5%, your cash loses 5% sitting in the bank. Simple.

But that's not actually true. Because "doing nothing" isn't just sitting in a bank. The real "doing nothing" is parking your money in Treasury bonds, because the access is that easy and the risk is that low. So the true inflation — the real headwind you're fighting — is inflation minus the Treasury bond yield.

That's the real current of the river you're swimming against. Most people are calculating it wrong.

It reframes everything. Suddenly, the river isn't as fast as you thought. The current is softer. You have more time to think, more room to breathe, more margin to make smart decisions instead of panicked ones. It's a cheat code. A boring, dusty, deeply unglamorous cheat code — but a cheat code nonetheless.

And I think I needed about 10 years of being present on the financial markets to actually understand this properly. Ten years. For something this fundamental. Which tells you a lot about how the financial education system fails us — or maybe how the "education" we get is designed to push us toward the flashy instruments, not the useful ones.

Treasury bonds are the least sexy instrument in the world. Which is exactly what makes them the most interesting.

So if you take one thing from this chapter, take this: go read about Treasury bonds. Not because they'll make you rich — they won't — but because understanding them changes the math on every other decision you make. You stop swimming against a phantom current. You start seeing the real one.

And once you see the real one, the whole game looks different.

It's fun to be back, talking to my phone in an empty room. What a time we live in.

So right now I'm on a business trip. And before I say anything else, let me get something out of the way — this trip exists because of my corporate job, which I'm genuinely thankful for. Thankful to myself, and to the people around me who helped me get here. But if I'm honest, I was the most important piece of this puzzle. Because I was the one willing to take the help, take advantage of it, and put my own work on top of it.

I feel like I have to say that, otherwise it sounds bad. Although — to whom am I even explaining? Why should I care whether you understand it fully? That's a fair question. Anyway. Side quest over.

The reason I'm recording this is a thought I had this morning. Over the last four to six weeks I've been on the road maybe 80% of the time. And the company I work for — don't ask me the name, it's strictly forbidden to share it outside the organization. Honestly, it reminds me of certain organizations I've read about and seen in movies. I'll let you figure out what I mean.

One of the perks: I get to stay in high-end hotels. This is probably the highest level of luxury I'll ever touch in my lifetime, and I'm thankful for it — it's nice to experience something like that, to understand it from the inside.

And here's the thought. Life is a little bit like hotel stars.

Going from one star to two is a real difference. Two to three, still real. But four to five? You can barely tell what you're paying extra for.

The change at the top gets tricky. Hard to even notice. And once I clocked it, I started seeing it everywhere.

There's a famous rule for this — the 80-20. Eighty percent of the results come from twenty percent of the work. The most important move is just to clear the threshold. Do the bare minimum to get off the floor, and you've already captured most of the value.

And it makes sense that it works this way. Think about it. If you're building any concept of levels — levels of anything — you start at level zero, level one. The beginning is stiff. Rigid. But progression runs toward infinity. There can be an endless number of levels. Nobody ever sat down and decided the range in advance.

Who decided hotels stop at five stars? I don't actually know the maximum. Five is the most I've seen. Maybe there are six, seven, eight somewhere. But do you think anyone, at the very beginning, designed a clean range from one to eight? I don't think so. They just kept adding stars, gradually, one at a time.

And gradual addition comes with a cost. Diluted value.

By the time you're inventing the fifth star, all the meaningful stuff was already used up building the second and third. There's barely anything important left to add.

So you start bolting on smaller and smaller things, because the big, obvious improvements were claimed early and categorized long ago. That's just the nature of an open-ended scale. And I think this concept is almost everywhere — anywhere the progression is open, where there was no strict range from the start. I'd estimate it covers about 80% of the things I see in this world. And that 80% isn't a random number. It's my gut estimate, which is kind of a fun coincidence.

So here's the punchline. Right now I'm in a three-star hotel. A week ago I was in a five-star. And if you ask me? I like this one a little more.

I genuinely can't see the difference. Okay — if I said I couldn't see any difference, I'd be lying. The flip-flops here are slightly less comfortable. Less smushy, less fancy, less furry. But still comfortable.

And honestly? I don't give a fuck.

Two months of silence. Not because I stopped thinking — the opposite. I've been daydreaming about one idea long enough that it's started to annoy me. So it's going on the page.

Short version: Facebook for the AI era. Social media, except the thing you post isn't a photo. It's a thought.

That sentence probably means nothing yet. Let me back up. Way up.

When I get excited about an idea, my instinct is always to go as fundamental as I possibly can. Not "what's trending" — what's primal. What has been steering us since before we had a word for steering. Because if you build on top of a primal behavior, you're building on rock. Everything else is sand.

So: the primal human. Take away the daily business of not dying — hunger, danger, shelter. What's left? We spent time with other humans. We talked to them. That was it. That was the best part of the day. Sitting with someone and showing them something. Getting something out of your head and into theirs.

Everything we've built since is just a faster, longer, louder version of that one move — transferring something from one mind into another mind.

And what's actually in a mind? Thoughts. That's the raw material. Everything we send each other is a byproduct — an artifact of a thought, packaged into something that can travel.

Look at the history of those artifacts and it's a surprisingly clean ladder.

Sounds. Words. Gestures. The first ones — free, instant, and dead the second they leave your mouth.

Then we started writing things down. Painting on walls. Suddenly the artifact outlives the moment that made it.

Then mail. Not email — mail. Words that could cross a distance you couldn't walk.

Then the telephone. Still distance, but now instant, and now with a voice attached. You could hear that someone was tired.

Then photos. And this one is special, because a photo doesn't need you. Once taken, it exists on its own. You don't have to be standing there holding a receiver. It's a self-living artifact — it can be passed around, and around, and around, long after you've left the room.

Then video. Then video, live.

And a livestream is the top of the current ladder. There's a word in social media for how much of a person you're actually getting — engagement — and nothing beats real time. You see someone now. They react to you now. The loop closes. That's the highest bandwidth we've ever managed between two humans who aren't in the same room.

Fine. That's where we are. So what's the next rung?

I think AI unlocks a new one, and I think the new artifact is the thought itself.

Here's the part that convinced me it's even possible. Think about how you understand your own thinking. You talk to yourself. Silently — assuming you're not a psycho — but you talk. That inner conversation is how a fuzzy thing in your head becomes a sentence you can actually say out loud. The translation is already happening, every day, in everyone. We just never had anywhere to put it.

So what if you could capture that step. A system asks you questions. You answer. Out of your answers it builds a model of how you understand the thing — a copy of your thinking, narrow and specific to that moment. And then someone else can ask it questions. Questions you never got asked. And it answers roughly the way you would have.

That's a new artifact. Self-living, like a photo. Interactive, like a livestream. And what it carries isn't what you saw — it's what you thought.

We've spent a century inventing better and better ways to send what we saw. Nobody has ever been able to send what they felt about it.

Make it concrete. I'm on a trip. Beautiful country, sitting on a beach.

What can I send you today? A photo. A video. If I really want to, a livestream — look, water. All of that is my eyes. None of it is me.

Now imagine instead I answer a handful of questions. Where am I. What am I feeling. What do I keep looking at. What does this remind me of. Probably a lot more than that, and honestly I have no idea what the right questions are — that's an enormous amount of engineering, and it's the actual hard part of this whole idea.

But if it works, what I send you isn't the beach. It's what the beach is doing to me. And you can poke at it. Ask it things I never thought to say.

Now, how would you actually ship something like this? Nobody adopts a brand new artifact cold. So you don't ask them to. You bolt it onto something they already understand. Post your photo — and attach the thoughts. The photo does the work of being familiar; the thought model just rides along. Free upgrade, no new behavior required.

And then, if it's any good, the ratio flips. The photo becomes the thumbnail. The boring part. People stop scrolling to look, and start opening things to understand.

A world where nobody cares about the photo anymore. Where the first thing you tap is — okay, but what was this person actually thinking?

That would be amazing.

And yes, I know the objection. It's synthetic. It's a model of a thought, not the thought. Philosophically you can take it apart in about four seconds, and someone will, in a very smug voice.

I don't think it matters. We are already doing this. Every photo you post is a lossy, curated, filtered stand-in for an experience nobody else can have. It's fake in exactly the same way. We keep doing it because the feeling of connection is the thing we're after — and the feeling is real even when the channel is artificial.

If it makes someone feel closer to you, I'm not sure I care whether a philosopher signs off on it.

One last thing. I notice this is the Artificial Journal from chapters three and four, grown up. Same seed. Back then the point was to model a person so a corporation could understand them. This time the point is to model a person so another person can.

I like this version much better.

Still a daydream. Still zero lines of code. But it's out of my head now, which was the entire point.

Last chapter ended with "zero lines of code." That aged fast.

Because the thing about me — and I'd argue the only genuinely useful thing about me — is that I'm a doer, not a planner. Planning is overrated. Especially now. Especially in technology, where the cost of just trying the thing has collapsed to almost nothing. You can spend three weeks writing a document about whether an idea works, or you can spend two hours finding out.

I gave it two hours. Not two weeks, not a roadmap. Two hours, and then I'd know something I couldn't have known by thinking harder.

So I built it. A Claude Code project, nothing but markdown files, structured after Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern. No database, no app, no interface worth the name. Just files on disk that hold a capsule of a memory.

And here's the rule I keep relearning and will apparently keep relearning until I die: cut the scope. Then cut it again. Not to a V1. Not to a V0. This was a V-minus-one. One memory. Two things it can do — save a memory by asking me questions, and give the memory back by letting someone ask questions. That's the entire product. Anything more and I'd still be building it instead of writing this.

Now the interesting part.

I was braced for the engineering. Capturing a thought, turning a rambling voice note into something a model could hold and answer from — that felt like the mountain. It wasn't. I talked, very briefly, about where I was and what was going on in my head, and the thing caught it. Honestly better than I expected. That whole side of the problem just… wasn't a problem.

What I hit instead was something I never wrote a single line about in the last chapter.

It's boring.

Not the output — the output is great. The doing of it. And I think I finally understand why, and it comes down to what the act feels like from the inside.

When you take a photo, you feel like an artist. Same with a video, same with a drawing. There's a little hit of creativity in it. You're framing something, choosing something, making something. It's play.

Answering questions about your own state is not that. You're not an artist. You're a journalist. A journalist assigned to cover yourself.

What do you see. What do you feel. What did you do today. It's not creation. It's a deposition. It's a therapy session where I'm also the therapist and neither of us is having fun.

And I have to be honest about what that means, because the whole point of doing the experiment was to find out something true. I cannot picture the world where someone finishes answering those questions and then posts it to their friends. Nobody is excited to share their own incident report. The artifact is good. The path to the artifact is a chore. And a chore with a beautiful output still loses to a photo you can take in half a second while laughing.

So either the incentive has to be enormous, or the process has to be redesigned from scratch. And "the incentive has to be enormous" is what people say right before their product dies. So: redesign.

Which is, weirdly, exactly the news I wanted. Because now I know where the hard part actually lives, and it isn't in the code.

Here's roughly where my head is going.

The old artifacts already won. Photos, videos — billions of people, every day, no convincing required. That behavior is validated at a scale I will never have to prove. So don't fight it. Use it as the input. Let the photos and the videos be the raw feed, and let AI read them into the memory. That part is free. People are already doing the work.

But that alone only gets you what the camera saw, and the whole reason I'm here is the layer underneath — the part that was never visible, that no lens has ever caught. And that layer can only come from the author. It has to be asked for.

So the real product isn't the memory. It's the questions.

The questions can't be a form. They have to be the good part. Exciting. Maybe provocative. Something you actually want to answer, and want people to see your answer to.

I don't have them yet. I'm missing something and I know I'm missing it. But the shape is doable, and I can feel myself circling it.

And the best thing about the whole two hours is what it told me about the road ahead. This isn't an engineering problem anymore. It's a design problem. A human problem. Figuring out what to ask a person so that answering it feels like a game instead of an interview.

That's creative work. That's the work I actually like.