Okay, I thought not posting here would drive me to write more on X, but it did the opposite. I don't know why, but I have this "what if someone says something bad" thought deep inside my brain, and it pulls me back from posting my real thoughts. So our journey log is back. Here's a recap of what I posted on those days.

mert düzgün@mertduzgun

i made these with @itsChloeHPR's liquid glass skill

7:40 PM · Nov 10, 2026

mert düzgün@mertduzgun

i just had the craziest 60 days of my life

i blocked every distraction from my iphone using waxmac.com

then i started building all the tools i need for my work to be efficient and secure

achelia.ai to manage multiple agents from my mac and iphone… Show more

8:29 AM · Nov 13, 2026

mert düzgün@mertduzgun

my favorite tool so far

Vinena Studio@vinenastudio·Nov 10, 2026

see your site on an iphone, a pixel or a folding phone, from a panel inside the page

3:07 PM · Nov 10, 2026

mert düzgün@mertduzgun

there's a lesson in this post, read it:

this video clearly got impressions but was too long and had many focus issues and it flopped because of low quality.

i was very excited to share it. no regrets.

but this will be my worst video i have ever shared.

this is actually proof… Show more

mert düzgün@mertduzgun·Nov 9, 2026

semi-raw footage of how i work from my phone these days

sorry for the focus issues, that was the best i could do in limited time. will do better next time ✌️

0:00 highlights
0:28 this is Achelia, built on herdr
1:37 close the lid, keep working from the phone
2:23 outside, the… Show more

11:09 AM · Nov 10, 2026

And I also decided to focus on X and knobs only for 60 days, starting next Monday.

The reason is:

1. Trying to learn both platforms at the same time is still hard as fuck, even though we have AI.
2. I'm wondering how far I could take one product with all my focus.
3. X is the best platform to share about knobs.
4. knobs is my most liked and endorsed project so far, and there's nothing like it in the market.

Semi-raw footage of how I work from my phone these days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZMNWyK7txI

Office of the day.

I was overthinking making videos, for a long time I made nothing. Yesterday I said enough, picked up my phone and recorded a video. It's the best performing post on my profile so far.

I shot a better one today, and I'll share it tomorrow. You'll like it if you want to see a working mobile harness.

Here's a quick demo of how I work.

I built everything on vinena.studio with this.

This is the quarter of building all the tools I need in my life. I created a workflow so good that I'm constantly shipping high quality tools in a very short time.

Check vinena.studio for all the things I shipped in the last 57 days.

Pro tip: get a VPS and self host Executor and OpenPanel.

Thank me later. Full post on my stack soon!

I launched claudemarketplaces.com one year ago.

It got 26M+ impressions and 800k+ clicks from Google.

Other stats:

• 2.5M unique visitors
• 550k+ monthly unique visitors at peak
• $67k+ ad revenue

This was just a silly project I built in 2 hours to test the Claude Code feature-dev plugin. I released it 5 hours after plugins were introduced.

You never know what works.

Oh btw, we have some open slots to advertise if you're building around AI: claudemarketplaces.com/advertise

I think I'll just ban myself from working more than 4 hours a day to find my true focus.

Spending all day in front of a screen, prompting, isn't what I dreamed of when I quit my 9-to-5.

knobs 0.6.0 is out.

You can now edit any page live in the knobs panel, like in devtools:

• Change CSS values, with suggestions for every property and value
• Add new CSS rules and force :hover or :focus
• Edit text, attributes and HTML in the DOM tree
• Move elements up and down
• Keep your edits after a reload
• Copy all your changes as a prompt for your agent

Shortcuts are now saved in the extension, so they work on every site. ⇧E opens elements, ⇧O opens settings, and one key alone can be a shortcut too.

The panel also keeps one width for every view now.

knobs.dev

Bad days happen.

It happened to me today. But I still managed to do something.

I have a rule of doing at least one physical activity a day to keep my sanity. It really helps.

And a reminder for myself: don't rush things.

The moat is actually giving a shit.

I want my work to be unique, so I created a background library from my own photos at mertduzgun.com/photos.

I always liked photography, but going out and shooting photos has more meaning to me now.

I'm building stuff to make money so I can spend more time diving into fundamentals and teach people along the way.

I have to do marketing because people are bad at research.

We waste so much time on social media that we can't even get to the best tools that are already out there on the open web.

We scroll instead. And there comes the attention economy. You outsource research and discovery to some third-party bullshit algorithm that mostly gaslights you.

Imagine a world where everyone has their attention span fixed, and they go and search the web instead of waiting for an unemployed extrovert to explain "prompt engineering" to them.

Imagine how high quality the tools we use would become if everyone focused on building the best thing out there to be seen.

Imagine a world where we glorified greatness instead of volume.

I have to learn the fucking rules of a platform. Who knows how many thousands of people changed how it works, and we're trying to reverse engineer it by wasting significant amounts of time.

Good work should be discovered.

I'm not using a terminal anymore. I built my own desktop and iOS apps that use herdr.

It's built for my needs, so I can do whatever the hell I want with it.

I built a decision, review and obstacle system. And a custom tabs system that generates UI on demand to show me any data I want, like company stats, without asking the agent all the time.

I can see all my other machines and agents, and many other things.

It's called Achelia, and I'll release it soon.

It's time to distribute the shit out of my apps and knowledge.

I'm slowly warming up accounts and creating content. Having a personal wiki is helping a lot.

The dude knows everything and creates stunning posts, using the photos I took as background :)

I love it when my physical efforts connect with my digital work.

Here are some examples of how I'm planning the posts:

I'm stopping all the client work to focus on my own apps.

I carried all projects under vinena.studio and will keep shipping high-quality apps and tools.

Here is its logo:

I'm able to build whole projects from my phone now. I'm even building the app with the app that I built and it's pushing updates over TestFlight and I can iterate fully remotely.

It's better than Moshi, Omnara, Happy and T3 Code.

At least for me. I tried all, none worked properly.
This one does.

For the ultimate test, I left home without my laptop and all work continued to progress.

I just review what I can review from the phone and do rest of the reviews when I'm back home. It's beautiful.

I always wanted to build software but not sit all day because I'm a person who loves nature and sports.

I finally enabled this for myself. Let's see how it goes.

I'm paywalling the apps again.

I want these apps to be maintained and used by people for a long time. So I decided to hire people and scale my initiatives.

I need money to do that. That's why I'm making the apps paid again.

Vinena is having a brand refresh, and it will own most of the products I made recently. I'm excited!

It's 3:41 am, and all those plans and decisions didn't mean shit.

I bought two new domains and built a new project today.

Things are cool and needed. But I don't know where this is going.

Time to sleep. I'll share them soon.

I redesigned CCM in an hour, with the style guide my LLM wiki collected while building landing pages for 4 different projects over the last 1.5 months.

I can now apply the rules to any site and they instantly look better. It takes approximately an hour to be completed. Beautiful.

BeforeAfter

The icon still took manual iterations, but I love it now.

This is how I iterated on it.

Alright, found it.

I'll build the best directory on earth, record each step, and publish the videos.

Still no direct way to make money, I know. But it's fine. We'll figure it out.

I'm so confused. I built many things, and none of them will lead me to money directly. I'm glad I made them free. But now I have a lot of distribution, and I still haven't released anything that makes money.

I still want to build more ideas. I have enough runway to keep building for a couple more months. But I'm also wondering what would happen if I truly focused on one thing.

I already have enough distribution from claudemarketplaces.com and its newsletter, with 11,000 subscribers. I think I should build something for those people as soon as possible.

I wanted to make YouTube videos too. That challenge has failed. I promised one video every week, and I didn't make them.

I think I should start simple and make videos on what I built and what each app does. Maybe even a weekly video on what I learned that week. I learn a lot of stuff, so I think it'd be helpful. I want to work my video editing muscle too. I know the first ones will be bad, so I want to start as soon as possible.

So I'll separate my days. Two hours a day for the videos, first thing in the day. Then four to six hours for building. I think that gives me the best of both worlds.

But I need to focus on one thing. I'll decide what that one thing will be. God, it's hard.

Big thanks to all folks who bought Agent Caffeine previously. Since yesterday, Agent Caffeine is free and open source.

All buyers have been refunded and won my heart <3

Enjoy and make sure you give me a star on GitHub!

P.S. If you're using any agent on a mac, you should check it out. You'll love it.

I was off for a couple of days. Every once in a while, I schedule time off for myself.

I never want to go at first. But once I do, I feel great.

Last month, I spent a lot of time in front of screens. I started to get some physical signals, even though I was feeling great psychologically.

The signs are mostly gone now. Sounds like a good decision to me.

I'm a person who doesn't know how to rest. So I use these trips as anti-burnout fuel.

Paste, the clipboard manager, is one of the most popular Mac apps I know. I've been using it for years through Setapp, paying $18 a month.

Yesterday, I created a better version of it that works perfectly. I canceled my subscription.

I don't want to say "everyone is going to build their own software" like the extremists do. But I know that someone with capabilities similar to mine is going to show people how to build their own stuff for their daily needs. So I've been asking myself: why am I not becoming that person?

I'm going to make everything I built in the last month free to use and open source. All of them are offline apps with no big server cost to me, so I'll be sharing them one by one.

I'll refund everyone who bought Agent Caffeine. Huge thanks to those folks!

knobs is also replacing the whole dev tools for me, including the inspect and network features. I'll publish a new version soon.

I haven't been yapping for a couple of days because I was thinking about this.

Huge thanks to everyone who reads and sends me nice messages! You're helping a lot!

DM me if you've seen the hint :)

I released the new version of Agent Caffeine just two days ago. There have been 67 visitors to the website so far, and we already made a sale.

We have a one week trial, so nobody has reached the end of it yet. This is a big signal to me.

People react when you share something truly good. These are the replies to my iPhone Duo demo of knobs.dev.

I wonder what would happen if my account wasn't shadow banned, and if I made a better post.

It's all about the people behind it.

The product, the film, the event, the book. Everything I like has a person, or a team of people, who care, work, sweat and create as a way of living.

These people can't live any other way. I understand them deeply, because I'm one of them.

We create for the world to consume. We make things for the world to watch. And we do our best, so the next generation gets inspired.

That's it. That's what this life is about for me.

And again, it's all about the people. Their habits, their lifestyle. Nothing else.

I'm getting into an unhealthy habit of working all the time. So I planned a trip for next week as a handbrake.

I don't want to go, but I will. For my health.

Work has no end. Ideas never end. Life is long enough.

I feel better now.

I guess I'm still bad at landing pages. Today I showed them to two real people in a cafe, and they didn't understand shit. So I remade them. Here's the before and after for each.

attention awareness, before:

After:

Agent Caffeine, before:

After:

I have to admit something. All my previous work was half-assed, low quality slop, because I was addicted to social media and kept forcing myself to stay away from it.

Quitting social media unlocked beast mode.

The attention awareness landing page is the biggest proof. I did more than 180 iterations on the website alone. I'm not tired of working for hours anymore. I'm not bored, and I don't feel like it's all for nothing, even though it's a free app and extension.

No more staying under my potential. It's time to show the world what I'm capable of. Stay tuned for good looking demos and products over the coming weeks.

I'm able to post to all platforms from my agent, by the way.

I have some sad news. After working on attention awareness for about a month and spending a lot of hours, I just learned that iOS 27 blocks the way my app works, and there is no other way. So the manual supervision guide, which erases the phone, is the only way. That's not nice.

The numbers: 25 days since the first commit, 22 of them with work in them. Roughly 140 hours. 885 commits. 184 tagged iterations of the landing page.

What can I say? Shit happens. But at least I have this beautiful landing page:

I probably focused on the wrong thing. But I still don't regret it, because it taught me a lot about how to build a landing page.

Thanks to all the rules we set for attention awareness, I was able to refactor the agent caffeine landing page in a day.

Before:

After (WIP):

I technically have more Mac apps shipped than web products. Kind of insane, because I don't even know Swift.

We shipped a shit ton, and I was able to do it because I started simple. I moved forward, created very silly stuff, did more than 180 iterations, and now we have a great landing page at the end. It took a lot of work, but I started simple and it built the momentum.

I'm going to do the same for the videos. I actually have a fancy setup. I have a fucking Fuji cam. I even have a fucking teleprompter, wireless mics and stuff. But I'm not going to use any of them. I'm just going to use my phone, and maybe the mics, and that's it.

I'm going to record some videos throughout the day, and then I will tell you guys what I've been up to. That's the plan. Tomorrow we ship.

It's fascinating how fast I can iterate now, thanks to my new setup. I built a simple and beautiful text editor with ProseMirror in a few hours, while doing other high quality work, and it works great for my personal needs. I update it, fix issues as they come in, and add new features on demand. It has nothing I don't need. I love this era of software!

I know I'm doing too many projects at the same time right now, but all this has a reason, which I will reveal soon.

Since I think I finally beat my consumption addiction, I create instead of consuming. But that's addicting too.

I skipped gym for the first time in months, just because I wanted to work.

Talk is cheap, I should show you the outcome. Here we go:

1- The editor I'm using in this website to write these entries and blog posts.

2- This is knobs, a drop-in dev tool based on my needs. It's beautiful and has many cool features such as a better version of react-grab built in, mocks devices and mobile browsers in your browser so you don't have to test from your phone just to get layout right. More on that soon.

3- New attention awareness website updated the macOS app: I'm very happy with the result and feeling proud that I built something that could change lives. It changed mine and my sisters' already.

I discarded a lot of the work I had done on the attention awareness website, and I'm glad I did. The new version makes me proud. It explains the product 1000% better, it doesn't hijack the scroll anymore, and it's shorter and quieter. The bounce rate is 34% and the average session is 7 minutes, but very few people have visited so far.

I'm finally satisfied with the landing page and the app, so I'm going to make it free, as a gift to the community.

The main inspiration is Foqos. Its maker basically made the Brick for free. Then I saw his donation page: so many people left kind, supportive messages about how the app changed their lives. It restored some of my faith in humanity. I want to do the same here.

At first I thought free would make it look worthless. Now I'm sure enough of the quality that people will see it's a serious project and trust it. I want more people to use it. Being free will push me to market it with pride. I will just put a pay whatever you want button and an option to sponsor the site. Releasing it for free is the ultimate proof that I'm doing this for the good, not for the profit.

As down as I was yesterday, I'm as hyped today. Things are going to be good.

I'm a little down today. I watched Chris Raroque's video I Built A New App In 1 Week, and we reviewed the attention awareness landing page against it. At the end, we wrote a new plan, and now I have to redo the landing page I've been working on for days.

It's a nice lesson. I need to think more about the purpose of a project.

The purpose of this one changed a lot. It started as a nonprofit, open source thing. Then I poured a lot of energy into it. Then I realized all the other alternatives are worse and charge more, and I thought: if I put this out there for free, people will think it's worthless. That's why I'm getting paid for it.

But yeah, I'm tired. I didn't do any physical activity today, so I'm going out for a jog at 10:30 pm. It's crazy.

I'm fascinated by how good Opus 5.5 is. Investing in my setup lets me work on five different projects at the same time.

Of course, I'm struggling to focus and my brain is very tired. But since I don't have any screen addictions anymore, I've turned all my screen time into productivity.

This is clearly not sustainable. But getting all those ideas out of my mind makes me feel very, very good.

I have a trip booked in a week. Until then, I'll push as hard as I can and ship as many things as I can. Then I'll have a very, very nice trip without thinking about work. When all these ideas are on my mind, I can't relax or enjoy trips or time off.

I literally tried to use up all my usage limits before the reset, and I couldn't. That's how good and cheap Opus 5.5 is. It also makes great visuals. Here are some examples.

I'm not optimizing for money, and I'm not optimizing for distribution. I'm going quality first, distribution second, with many small ideas.

I'm not tying myself to any strategy. I'm a pretty flexible person. But in this part of my life, I just want to get better and make better things, because my tools, my time and my life finally allow it.

There's no rush. Each time, I try to build a better product and improve the systems around it. My agent setup, my skills, the libraries I use, my taste, my starter templates: they all get better every time I crack something. I think what I learn from these small ideas will prepare me to take on big ones.

I always research first. If a good solution exists, I use it and recommend it to my friends. If the product I want doesn't exist, I go and build it.

I'm dropping the rule about not posting anywhere else.

I realized Opus 5.5 uses very few tokens and gives me a lot of room to build more. So I invested a couple of days into a more scalable setup. Now I have one Hetzner box, one Mac mini and one MacBook Pro, all connected through herdr and Tailscale, and I can reach all of them from my phone.

Thanks to attention awareness, I also have a lot of time right now. I replaced my content addiction on X and Instagram with building progress. My phone screen time is under 2 hours a day on average, and more than 1 hour of that is Moshi, the app I use to command my agents.

This lets me tackle the ideas I've had in my mind. I have more than 30. I built prototypes for some of them before, with older models and very limited time. A few people used them, gave me very positive feedback, and keep asking me to finish them and ship them properly.

So I have to get them out of my head. That's the only reason. I don't expect them to go viral, and I don't feel like running a big marketing campaign for any of them. I just want to finish them and put them out, so at least my friends and I can use them, because they make our lives easier. For each one I'll make a proper demo video and a proper release, and that's it.

Sharing simple posts about them on X and LinkedIn won't hurt my focus. That's why I'm removing the rule. Who knows, one of them might get a lot of attention.

Starting Monday, I will publish one YouTube video every week for 12 weeks, and I will drop every other platform. No X, no LinkedIn, no Instagram, no TikTok.

At its core, I need a distribution channel. I want to reach people who build things, people who want better, high-quality tools. I'll try every channel eventually, but I've had success with SEO, and YouTube backs it up because it's search and discovery in one place.

The others are hard for me. I don't like following trends or posting every day. I'd rather put real time into one video and make sure it's worth watching.

I will log what I build, when I get distracted, and how I think about each decision here, every day.