Maker Journal September 2026

September was an interesting month. I’m trying to kickstart some new products while also figuring out how to automate more of my workflow with AI.

I’m getting more used to this new AI workflow. Not just using AI to build products — believe me, building is probably the easiest part now. The harder part is everything around it: deciding what to build, marketing, content, research, maintaining the product, and figuring out what can actually be automated.

I’m still tweaking my AI workflow, which I’m calling Solo. The main idea is to let AI handle more of the work while I remain the human making the final decisions.

It has changed quite a few times already depending on the tools available, and I’m now at Solo Workflow v4. With all these new AI bots and agents popping up, I’m still figuring out how they fit into the workflow. I guess this will continue changing for a while.

One of the bigger milestones this month was launching my first native iOS app — BarPeek.

BarPeek is a free companion app for CodexBar, the popular Mac menu bar app that shows your AI usage. Because of how the Mac app works, there wasn’t really a direct way for me to check it from my phone, so I built BarPeek mainly for my own use.

Now that it’s built, the next challenge is something I’m less familiar with: figuring out how to market it and get it in front of the right users.

During my September Product Weekend, I also launched ELI5.SG.

It’s basically a localized “Explain Like I’m 5” site where I try to explain local terms and topics in a simple way. I see it more like a content directory, and I’m currently experimenting with SEO and figuring out how to grow the content.

Again, there are quite a few moving parts here that AI could automate. Research, content ideas, SEO, updating old content… I’m still working out how much of this I can hand over to AI without making the whole thing feel like AI-generated junk.

The biggest surprise for me this month was finally getting to explore GrokBot.

It’s hard for me to justify subscribing to yet another AI service, but GrokBot really opened my eyes to what this new generation of bots can become. It also made me look at Hermes differently and got me thinking about quite a few new ideas around bots, agents, and how they can work together.

Lastly, September was meaningful for another reason.

I finally handed over a few client WordPress sites to a new vendor company. I only have two WordPress sites left on hand now.

WordPress services were my bread and butter for many years, so slowly moving away from them feels a little strange. But at the same time, I honestly can’t wait to clear the remaining ones and free up more room for the things I actually want to work on now.

So yeah, that’s September.

New products, my first native iOS app, more AI experiments, another version of Solo Workflow, and slowly saying goodbye to an old part of my freelance business.

Now moving into the last quarter of 2026.

Let’s see what I can ship before the year ends.