This Is What Happens When You Build AI in Public

My wife gave me homework. Two AI projects. I said yes — partly because I’m an idiot, mostly because they were solving the exact kind of business problems that companies quietly drown in every single day.

That’s the whole reason this show exists. So many businesses are buried in broken workflows and they know it. They just live with the pain. Hiring that gets stuck inside somebody’s inbox. Follow-ups that only happen if a human remembers. Content that never gets made. And general admin work that burns brain cells all week — the stuff you procrastinate on until it finally, painfully gets done.

Here’s what we do on Extreme AI Makeover: we fix those problems in public, for free, using AI — mostly the different flavors of Claude. We do it with build partners who have real business problems. They don’t pay us a dime. They pay us in time, honesty, and a clear articulation of what’s actually broken. These are builds we’d normally charge real money for. This isn’t watered-down tutorial crap.

Season 1 starts at home

Season one kicks off with the one person who’ll tell me when my work sucks. Okay — she’d never actually say it sucks. That’s my wife, Melanie.

Melanie’s a registered dietitian. She works with Dietitians on Demand — we just call it DoD. And no, not that DoD. Nobody’s getting deployed overseas here. DoD finds her gigs in hospitals and healthcare organizations, usually on three-month contracts. One day she sat me down and said, “I have two projects I really need you to do.” With AI and vibe coding in the mix, it wasn’t a huge lift. So of course I said yes.

Project #1: The DoD job sniper

About a month before a gig ends, Melanie starts hunting for the next one. The old way: open the job board, scroll, eyeball it, figure out which states we actually want to live in next — maybe Colorado, maybe the Pacific Northwest. Manual, slow, and the good contracts go fast. She missed out on plenty of them.

So we built a job-sniping engine called DoD Alert. Twice a day it texts her and emails her every open contract in the states we actually want — phone and inbox. She taps the link on either device and goes straight to apply, or texts her recruiter directly. She’s not job searching anymore. She’s sniping. Version one is live right now. Was the build smooth and easy? Nope. Not even close.

Project #2: The study engine

This one’s personal. Melanie is getting recertified for her oncology nutrition certification. It’s a brutal exam — dense material, and she’s grinding through it while running her practice. The old study method? Read, highlight, take notes, and hope it all sticks. That’s not a strategy. That’s hope with a highlighter.

So we built a study agent. It takes her material and turns it into active recall — questions, quizzes, explanations. It adapts to what she already knows, hammers on what she doesn’t, and keeps her on a schedule from day one all the way to test day.

Neither of these needed a big budget, six months of planning, or a dev team. It took about 20–30 minutes of sitting down and mapping it out, then building with Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Two projects, one very patient wife, and zero cold calls to land my first clients.

What’s next

Episode 2 is the deep dive — the actual tools, the mistakes, and Melanie’s verdict on both builds after using them for a month and a half. If this show is for you, subscribe, hit the bell, and drop a thumbs up so you don’t miss it.

We need build partners

This is the real ask. Season one needs build partners. Four requirements: you’ve got a real workflow problem, you’ll show up for three episodes, you’ll be honest about what’s working and what isn’t, and you’ll actually implement what we build. That’s it.

Want in? Head to extremeaimakeover.com, hit the Build Partner button, and fill in the few fields at the bottom. Takes a minute.

This isn’t AI inspiration. This is AI execution. Real builds. Real struggle. Real results. This is Extreme AI Makeover.