About

I’m Daniel Aguilar. I’ve been a New Yorker since about 2014, and I’ve lived in Haverstraw for most of that time. I’ve also lived versions of my life that don’t usually show up in a web designer’s bio. I’m in recovery. I’ve been homeless. I’ve been incarcerated. I write about all of it publicly, because the record is the point: where I started is what makes where I am measurable.

I went back to school at community college at 40. I studied, I wrote constantly, and somewhere in there I started building things — first a website for a grocery store down the street, then more. When AI coding tools arrived I didn’t treat them as magic; I treated them the way you learn to treat anything when the stakes are yours: use it, then check it.

That habit became a rule I wrote at the top of my project notes: receipts, not vibes. I was using it for weeks before I realized it was also the name of the business. Every claim on this site is the kind you can verify — dated, sourced, and where possible produced by a script anyone can run. When my own experiment failed, I published that too.

The business is the same story pointed outward. Small businesses around here mostly don’t have websites, or have ones nobody can update. Working people are being sold AI as either a miracle or a menace. I sit in the gap: I build affordable sites with an AI-assisted workflow, and I teach people — one on one — how to use these tools and how to verify what they produce. The improvements to my own life are the demonstration that this is real.

If any of that sounds like your situation, or your neighbor’s — say hello.