Why I started building Materia AI before it was anywhere near finished.
There's a specific kind of bad moment that happens on a restaurant floor. A table orders the salmon. You put it in. Ten minutes later the kitchen sends it back — we're out. Now you're the one walking back to that table to explain it, and if you're unlucky, you already told them how good it was.
That moment isn't rare. It happens most shifts, in some form. Not because anyone's bad at their job — the chefs are stretched thin managing inventory in real time, and the news that something ran out almost always breaks in the middle of service, never before it. By the time it reaches the floor, a waiter has usually already offered the thing that's gone.
I've been on that floor for years now, alongside writing code. And after watching that same gap play out shift after shift — the kitchen struggling to track what's left, the waiters left out of the loop until it's already a problem in front of a customer — I stopped seeing it as just part of the job and started seeing it as something I actually knew how to fix.
That's the honest origin of Materia AI. Not a hackathon idea, not a "what if" I dreamed up staring at a blank editor. It's a problem I watched happen in front of me, over and over, from the side of the job most software never gets built by.
Where it actually stands right now
I want to be straight about this instead of dressing it up: Materia AI isn't finished. The backend — the part that takes a menu item and turns it into a real, bilingual description a customer can understand at a glance — works end to end. I've run it, watched it produce something usable, and trusted the pattern enough to build on top of it. The frontend, the actual page someone would click around on, still isn't there yet.
So instead of sitting on it until it's "done" — whatever version of done would've made me comfortable enough to show it — I pulled out the backend piece and put it up on Gumroad. Not as a polished product with a bow on it, but as a working slice of the pattern: the part that actually solves the core problem, available now, while the rest keeps getting built in the open.
The reasoning is simple. If you've watched a version of this same problem happen in your own work — some gap where the people closest to the issue are the last to know about it — you probably don't need to wait for my finished app to go do something about it. You need a working starting point. That's what I put out there.
Why I'm telling it this way
I could've waited to write about Materia AI until it had a homepage, a demo video, the whole thing polished for a launch post. I decided not to, on purpose. The version of this project that's useful to someone else right now isn't the finished one — it's the honest one. The floor-level problem, the working piece that came out of actually solving it, and the rest still in progress.
If you're building something and you're waiting to talk about it until it's "ready," I'd push back on that a little. The interesting part isn't the finished screenshot. It's the moment you noticed the problem was real enough to act on.
I'm continuing to build Materia AI in the open — backend first, frontend next, and I'll keep sharing what that actually looks like as it happens. If you want the working piece of the pattern to start from, it's on Gumroad. And if you're working on something similar, or want another set of hands on a backend/AI integration problem, I'm open to freelance and full-time work — you can find more of what I've built on GitHub.
Top comments (0)